The Summer Rogue
by cryptically
Summary: MeghanPuck. What could make Summer's greatest trickster fall in love? And what made him so reluctant to act on it when he had sixteen years of opportunity? Missing scenes, twists on canon await.
1. The Rogue's Ward

**Author's Note**:

I couldn't believe how much I liked this series at first. I had put a temporary hold on writing fanfic until I finished a few of my older stories, but this demanded being written. Puck is probably my favorite character, inasmuch for his idiosyncrasies as his abilities. I like that he doesn't tell Meghan how much he likes her until it basically is forced out of him; it makes me think that there's some reason for it, which is part of what this fic will investigate.

Of course, this is also just an opportunity for me to spread the Puck/Meghan love by adding in hidden scenes or offering a what-if perspective at later points. And even though I may deviate from canon eventually, it's probably still a good idea to consider this **spoiler**y for anything up to and including The Iron Queen.

Enjoy!

-cy.

* * *

><p>Getting sent away by Oberon to look after his half-human daughter was one thing, but not being allowed one last evening of wild parties and madness before that was an entirely different matter. Robin Goodfellow wasn't the kind of faery any king could just send to the human world for inexplicably long periods of time without a huge celebration to mark the occasion. Make no mistake, his last night in the Nevernever had been filled with raucous frenzy and festivity, making it definitely one to remember. He was sure of it.<p>

It was really too bad he couldn't remember anything about it, though.

He rubbed his temples idly as he strode through the woods, almost stepping into a murky patch of ground in his distraction. Faeries were allowed to overindulge too, he frowned at the mud, as though it were making a statement. So, she really did live in a swamp, huh? Talk about the princess as a pauper.

His head still ached a little from the revelry, but occasionally a faint recollection percolated through his consciousness. Had he really been on the arm of a tipsy nereid on the way out? He remembered dancing with her, sure, but leaving with her? Well...that was something.

Sixteen years.

He would be doing this for sixteen years. The big one-six. Not like it was a huge commitment for an immortal fey- anything to get out of Titania's hair for that long, right? - but it was still an eternity to be out of Faery, definitely longer than he'd ever been away. Puck was mostly sure that he couldn't die, but this seemed like it was pushing the limit. What a way to have to do the king's dirty work...

And it was all because the Summer Queen was alternating between being calculatingly vindictive and flying off the handle at the mere mention of her husband's illicit child. Well really. Puck's nose wrinkled as he stepped into another puddle. It wasn't like Oberon had been all that chaste before. Titania just usually got to the infants a little faster than this one.

Tilting his head up to the sky, he sighed. _Meghan Chase, what made you so different? It almost would have been easier for you if you hadn't been so good at getting away, kid._

He transformed into a raven, weaving through the treetops until his ascent allowed him a full view of the woods. The way that her family had disappeared, Oberon had been right in sending his right-hand faery (jester nothing, this was what Puck was made for) into the fray. Granted, he'd had a little hint...

And that was when something piqued his interest.

He'd had to fly in circles for a little bit, but the advice he'd gotten from the dryad about the princess' location had been true. Sure enough, at the edge of the woods there was a little house, almost a cottage, but a little less cozy, with the washing hanging out front. What do you, one half-faery Summer princess found. Score one Puck, zero Titania.

Ducking below the drain spout on their house, the black bird watched the lawn. A sandy-haired woman hung up clothes on a line that wandered in the wind back and forth, obscuring and showing her slim figure in turns. Next to her was an easel that faced the woods, and a small plastic baby seat on the grass that swayed gently in the breeze. The bird eased forward to catch a glimpse of what lay inside, the child that was bound to make his life miserable for years to come, if she was so unfortunate as to survive past infancy.

But as he looked at her, he didn't see a nuisance per say; it was more that she reminded him of everything clean. She was in a neatly wrapped package of cloth and her hair was startlingly white, like the linens floating around her.

And she was _looking_ at him.

To be fair, looking at a bird on a drain spout had never been an indicator of anything good or bad, but this was different. She was staring at him fixedly, as though if she glanced away or blinked even for a moment, he would disappear.

The raven cocked its head.

Perhaps this would be more interesting than he'd though after all.

-o-

Truthfully, it had been a sad, messy affair from the very start.

"Oh my, Puck, whatever _brought_ you here? Has Oberon decided to extend the hand of friendship at last, or are you here on some other distasteful business?" Leanansidhe looked as disgusted as if someone had asked her to keep house in a room full of iron. Still, her foyer was nicely attired for somewhere that shouldn't exist, Puck had to admit, though the discordant bleats of music coming from down the hall and the red cap gang squabbling in the kitchen next door did take away from it a bit. But not much. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed magic.

He gave her his most winning smile. "Oh, just saying hi. Being neighborly, since I'm more or less stuck in the mortal realm, too."

Her eyes narrowed and Puck tried not to dwell on how wise bringing that up had been. Finding the trod to the Queen of the Exiles was one thing (not easy), getting her to listen to a proposal when vexed was another story (borderline impossible). He knew he had to play everything at his best or else she'd find him out for sure. Not to mention what Titania would do to him if she found out about his hand in ruining her plans yet again.

His heart was still racing from the escape from Arcadia. Titania was on the warpath, that was for sure. Puck didn't relish the thought of being a raven for a few centuries- it had been bad enough being in the human realm for six years and in comparison, even sixteen years would look like a picnic. If he was going to do anything to save the kid's father, it was going to have to happen now, no mistakes, no failure.

It was a tall order but then again, he was Puck, _the_ Puck, and if there was any faery that could do this-

"I'm not sure I would call us neighbors, dear. But you must have come here for something other than to renew acquaintances. I know I would very much like to know how you found my humble abode, more specifically, what little friend of yours showed you the way." Her voice lilted up at the end, as though posing a question. She toyed with the foyer's lights as a displeasingly flat strain of bass guitar music drifted out of a further room. It was only for a second, but her mouth quirked slightly in annoyance.

And there, Puck saw his way in.

He shrugged, nonchalant. "I'm not here on Oberon's business or anyone's but my own, Lea. But now that you mention it, I came across something that might be of interest to you."

"Oh?" Leanansidhe's features were blank, a perfect gamin's face. She could be intrigued, have taken the bait hook, line, and sinker or just be playing him and he'd never know it. "Whatever did you have in mind?"

"Not a 'whatever,'" Puck corrected, "as much as a 'whoever.'" The bass struck a harsh note and he cringed. "But definitely someone a little more enjoyable."

Why did he care so much about this? He wasn't getting anything out of it.

The memory of the little girl's face breaking into a smile when her father came home flashed through his head. Her eyes crinkled up in a way they didn't for anyone else. Puck reminded himself to focus. It wasn't like he was doing this for the girl. This was strictly messing up Titania's plans, doing what he did best: making a laughingstock out of a faery queen and dancing safely out of her reach. Saving the princess' human father, well, that was just a coincidence.

A small, slightly lethal smile began to form on Leanansidhe's lips. "Ah. Well, do tell, pet. I am all ears when it comes to these things."

Puck let go a breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Him, nervous? Nah. This was all going exactly according to plan. He was safe: mission almost accomplished, Titania thwarted once again. Still...why did he have this sense of misgiving?

"How much do you like piano?"

-o-

His first time on the bus was like the world's worst joke.

It felt like he was stuck in a trash compactor; he was constantly checking to make sure that the walls weren't slowly moving inward to crush him. Already, he was starting to feel the air getting more and more dense with the iron, sticking to his skin, choking him out. Maybe there was some trick to lasting through it, but if there was, it was a damn good one to elude a trickster such as fifteen minutes he was starting to see double. He felt dirty, like he could feel the iron writhing its way into his skin, like a infection bubbling along his arms.

It was all he could do to keep conscious and keep his glamour up- it even seemed like the bus itself was determined to rip it off him so much that he had to constantly keep fixing it, dabbing the tears and holes that formed, lest he appear as anything different than a normal first grader on his first day of elementary.

_I'm going to throw up as soon as we get there_, he thought drearily,_ but even that will be a relief after this_.

At first, he didn't notice as someone slid into the seat next to him. He was about to redouble the glamour and exude a go-away vibe- because let's face it, he really did not feel like dealing with humans right now- when it struck him how different the air around him felt all of a sudden.

It wasn't the stolid, heady scent of iron and its strange pulse digging into him, though it was definitely still there. It just didn't seem as bad now, like something familiar and wild had flown in through the window, a breath of the woods and wildflowers the bus passed.

He looked over, slightly haggard but curious.

It was a girl.

Not a very pretty one, if he was going by human standards. She would be the kind of girl that you'd forget instantly, no matter how outrageously she dressed (though her loose-fitting cotton pants and t-shirt were by no means extraordinary), how she spoke (without much accent, except for a few words), or what she said (which ended up being most important).

"Hi! My name's Meghan Chase. What's your name?"

Suddenly, bus rides started to look more doable.

Puck smiled back, the words already slipping gracefully off his tongue. "I'm Robbie. Robbie Goodfell."


	2. The Rogue's Game

**Author's Note**:

Thanks so much for reading the first chapter! There's a few things I want to clear up before we get into the second installment, mainly how I'll handle spoilers. I'll list whenever a chapter has spoilers for the Iron Queen in it before in a note before the chapter begins, so if you're not done yet and don't want to be spoiled, avoid reading those chapters.

For this chapter, this is a slight spoiler (it's elaborated on something that may or may not have been obvious from the first book) though I didn't use as names or specifics.

Also, if anyone reading has any suggestions for scenes or prompts, of moments of squee they'd like to share, feel free! I'd love to hear how I'm doing, especially during the first time writing for this fandom.

Thanks as always for reading and enjoy!

-cy.

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><p>He moved through the throng like a caged thunderstorm, pulsing to the beat of the bass speakers, shiny with rain or sweat- he couldn't tell which. The pounding rush of the drums echoed between his footsteps and inner ear; balance was at a premium tonight and all the fey in Blue Chaos came hungry.<p>

Some were plastered along the walls, others found humans eager for something more exotic than the usual fare, but not Puck. Though no one would blame him if he did; after all that time loping around that dead-end school of hers, narrowly avoiding both iron and a slow death by boredom, he deserved to enjoy himself more than any of them.

Sweat dripped down his glass like a slow threat, a drooping eyelid at an opium den lost in a grinning addiction. Everything seemed oily, as though it were experiencing a slow melt and humans and faeries both were too caught up in the glamour to care.

He didn't need to drink to feel it, the currant-flavored sting of the emotion drifting up in waves from the dance floor, begging him to join it like a magnetic tide. But he still raised his glass and smiled at a woman across the room. She'd been staring at him and whispering to her friends for the past half hour and, hey, it wasn't like he wasn't curious.

Humans have always been fixated by fey. Always. Just ask the phouka pressing that guy in chain pants against the wall, or the satyr who snuck off with the red-head to explore the back alley. It never ends well for the humans, but they never learn.

So when the girl he smiled at started to make her way over through the pulsing crowd, Puck couldn't say he was surprised.

He just sipped his drink and winked.

-o-

"Robbie? Hey, Robbie!"

Puck shook himself awake. Damn, another fine nap ruined by duty. Oberon was going to owe him big time for this.

"Hey," Meghan poked him in the shoulder with her pencil and the metallic bite of the lead stung a little. "Come on, you said you'd be my partner, remember?"

Partner? Robin Goodfellow was no man's partner, no matter how many people liked to think he was. Above all, he was out for himself, even and especially when faeries were involved. And right now, he could sure use more excitement than this dreary little town could provide. He wondered if it was starting to wear him down, if it was possible for eight years with humans to erase someone like him. What was Oberon thinking, wasting his invaluable jester on this?

But his half-breed was looking at Puck so expectantly that the Summer faery forgot his grievances with her father for a moment. "Yeah, sure." Seeing how her face lit up, he laughed, and then tried to quickly remember what he'd agreed to. "So, what are we working on?"

Meghan rolled her eyes with all the indignation a small human could muster. "You weren't paying attention? _Presidents_."

Puck frowned. What, was he supposed to be memorizing every moment of fourth grade social studies in ecstatic scholasticism? Any reasonable human charge would be happy that he'd at least bothered to remember the name of the class, let alone its assignments. Glamouring the teachers to think that he was a middling-but-not-great student, someone that could do better if he tried, and without memorable parents or effectual parent-teacher conferences was a lot of effort. He could at least be allowed to zone out sometimes.

Shooting him a worried look, Meghan bit her lip and Puck sighed.

Okay, concession time: she didn't know all that, she couldn't. All she knew was that he was her partner on a silly project she'd probably never remember a month later, either because he'd fade out of her existence entirely and take her memories of him along or it would become insignificant in hindsight.

It was hardly worth it.

But if there was one thing that he loved, it was putting on a good show for a willing and gullible audience.

"Okay, then. What's our president?" He asked in his most earnest voice.

"'Who,' silly, a president's not a 'what.'" A gust of wind came in through the window, bearing with it a honeysuckle scent that toyed with Meghan's hair. As she pushed it back into place, Meghan smiled, something that had gotten rarer lately. Puck had meant to find out why, but had never been able to summon the effort. Probably just a human thing. "And we have James K. Polk."

"Oh." Puck replied, not knowing if this thing called a Polk was good or not. "Cool."

-o-

At the bar, a banished Winter sidhe mixed drinks, blowing on the glasses to frost them before she poured out the contents of the cocktail shaker. Puck caught her raising a brow as he led the girl to the dance floor, but her eyes went back to her task coolly, nonchalant as a shrug saying _you could do better_.

And hey, he probably could.

But he was not interested in doing better- no, tonight, he was only interested in how this human's emotions sang as he danced with her, running his hands down her jeans and tacitly fingering the edges of the white blouse she wore. Anticipation, daring, worry and wonder all blended into one: it was a veritable feast.

That was when it was best- the moment of extreme longing, of her not knowing whether or not he was as attracted to her as she was to him, her biting wonder at what he would say if she asked him to go outside with her for a break and maybe something more. He could taste the hope piercing the air around her, as though her sweat and perfume had combined over the course of the evening to produce a fragrance so intoxicating it could lure him into any promise.

Too bad for her that he was a faery much cleverer than that.

-o-

"Um, this is my room."

Meghan frowned and worried the hem of her t-shirt. Human culture was still so...beyond him sometimes. Puck was used to children imagining great things, worlds too extravagant to exist and only being sad when they had to return to reality. What could possibly be wrong with a clean bedroom? Puck stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked around.

She had a bed, a small-ish one, but sufficient for a child her age, a cherrywood dresser (he could feel the fruit tree humming through the wood when he brushed by it), and a pile of library books on James K. Polk piled on a table in the center of the room. Near the books were scissors, a large sheet of poster paper, a glue stick, and a pile of colored construction paper. At least the art supplies held some promise. Wouldn't it be worth it if she had some latent creative streak? She'd daydreamed a lot when she was younger, but it had started to die down recently. Maybe she had a hidden talent.

"It's pretty neat." He commented blandly, sitting down in front of the table. Maybe he was actually going to like this project. It definitely beat hanging around as a raven on the powerlines outside all night.

Her head shot up. "Really? I mean, it's a lot smaller than other kids' rooms. And they have more stuff."

Puck shrugged. Was that seriously it? "It's your room, so I like it."

That made her happy, somehow. Together, they worked on finding information on their president for a long while. Puck was impressed. He knew that she was a good student, but he hadn't imagined that she'd be this productive at home. Didn't most kids have their parents checking in on them as they worked at this age, or had he gotten that wrong?

"You work really hard."

She almost jumped, she was so entranced in the book she was reading. "Oh, um, yeah, I guess." Then she glanced at the door. "Mom said that she was going to make cookies, but I guess she forgot. She's really nice," she said adamantly, as though he was disbelieving her, "but she doesn't always remember stuff all the time. I was hoping that since you came maybe she would, but..."

She trailed off, and suddenly it all made sense.

She probably had such a great work ethic because that was just who she was; her mother certainly didn't come in to check on her all the time, and it was probably lucky that Mrs. Chase still remembered to feed her daughter, given that Meghan had half the magic of Oberon (possibly) and most humans forgot him in a moment flat. Yet, what surprised Puck most was what she said next.

"My birthday's next week. I'm gonna ask Mom if it's okay if I have a party this year. If I can, um...would you like to come?"

He grinned. A party? Here was a human activity he could go for. "Sure! Who else are you gonna invite?"

She still kept smiling, but he noted that the intensity lessened considerably. "Just you. The other kids at school have kinda been saying mean things about me, so..."

At once, Puck felt a strange tightening in his gut. What was this? Yeah, she was just a half-mortal, half-faery kid, and yeah they tended to get teased a lot or ignored or both in alternation, so why did it bother him so much that his ward was feeling the brunt of it? Every kid in elementary school knows how to single out the different one in the bunch. Why should she have escaped it?

His voice still came out darker and rougher than he expected it to when he responded. "Who?"

-o-

"I cannot believe you, Robin Goodfellow."

The project ended up going surprisingly well. Once Puck found out that he enjoyed acting out some of the exploits of Mr. Polk (a man actually with his own faery encounters, it turned out), he made Meghan laugh all through their practices and wowed the class as his partner listed facts and he performed them. For a moment, Robbie Goodfell and Meghan Chase were the two people everyone in Mrs. Harrington's social studies class wanted to be. He hadn't even needed to glamour their teacher to ensure that they got an A. Not that he would, perfectly honest as he was.

It was really more what happened after in the hallway that was the problem.

The nurse threw up her hands and the tiny office seemed to take on a darker, more earthy look as she ranted. "The Erkling will be very displeased, I shouldn't need to tell you, but apparently after today's escapades, you need some reminding of what your place is here and what rules you need to obey. Did you even think-"

"Oberon," Puck cut in smoothly, sitting on top of a filing cabinet in the guise of a red-haired high-schooler so he wouldn't be recognized as his eight-year-old self, "did not know what those kids were saying to her. Believe me, they more than had it coming to them."

"No one said you had to intervene!" The nurse spluttered back, shaking her head. "That's not your place to decide. Even more than that, turning them into rats-"

"Mice." Puck corrected.

"I've had to change them all back, make them forget, and make their parents forget, and I'll have to arrange a meeting with the principal somehow to do the same thing. How could you lose your temper so...?"

He stopped listening and gently nudged the window open. What was his problem? Obviously he didn't feel anything for her; he couldn't. Oberon was made a laughingstock for producing Meghan in the first place, and still was ridiculed by the few who knew, especially Titania.

Did he really want to subject himself to _that_?

The nurse was still saying something in the background, but he cut in one last time.

"You know, I really liked this gig before Oberon decided I needed backup."

And with that, the red-haired boy was gone and a jet black raven flew out the open window in a swirl of dislodged paperwork and feathers, leaving a very angry school nurse in its wake.

Faeries did not have feelings for humans and make it out okay. Every court has their own stories of abducted humans, tragic romances with death on both sides, and friendship doomed by a misplaced word or promise. The bottom line: it never works.

-o-

So he won't let anyone get close.

He dared the girl to follow him through the dance floor, told her that he wanted to take her somewhere special. Enticed, she agreed, sporting a sly smile.

It only took three minutes to lose her. In the span of one song whose bass forced his heart to beat with it, he wove through humans and faeries alike lost to sound and the ecstasy of close touch. While a DJ mashed two tracks together into a fusion of song, Puck skirted gyrating couples like an electronic riff, ducked under crowd surfers with the low beat of the drumline, and lost his pursuer in the harmony, all without changing his appearance.

It was only afterward, when he friends found her in the middle of the floor and pulled her into their group that he morphed into a brown-haired, blue-eyed businessman on a night out, tipped an imaginary hat, and left.

That she probably wouldn't remember ever meeting him by tomorrow was the perhaps greatest trick of all.

-o-

"Happy birthday!" He sang when the door opened.

Because, okay, sometimes he broke his own rules. And if it meant that he had to become a bit of an anathema himself to get her to smile like that, then so be it. The human world got too boring after a little while if you didn't break a few rules. Faery did too, he guessed.

This was probably why they called him a trickster. Really, he was just keeping things interesting.

"Oh wow, you got me a Chia pet?" Meghan gushed, hands flying to her mouth. "I've always wanted to try growing those and, awww! That hedgehog one is so cute! But didn't you know that you're supposed to wrap it, Robbie?"

"Oh, I was?" Puck replied, looking at the box askance as Meghan giggled. He would really need to start paying more attention to this human culture thing if he was going to throw rules to the wayside and be friends. But why on earth would you want to disguise a gift? Wouldn't you want to show it off and make other people jealous, like at the courts? It made no sense. "Oops, I guess I forgot."

"You forgot!" She was laughing so hard he thought she might cry. "How do you forget something like that?"

So maybe he was on the track to being a laughingstock, too, if this was any indication. But in all fairness, he would have been a very poor jester to the Summer Court if he couldn't make a fool of himself sometimes. Today was just one of those special occasions.


	3. The Rogue's Vow

A thousand daggers of light shot through the glass, refracting his bored face back at him.

"Oh, so that's what Ms. Edel meant when she said that the light curves through a prism. Okay, now I think we measure the length from lens to image to get the focal point, right?"

"Uh huh."

He toyed with the light along the glass like he were a cat turning a ball of string over in his paw. Even after seven more years shadowing Meghan, humans were still surprising him, so strange, easily manipulated with their fascination for opposites, light and darkness, solstice and equinox, summer and-

"...um, Robbie?"

Abruptly, Robin Goodfellow remembered that he was supposed to be a freshman in high school. What's more, he was supposed to be a freshman doing an optics experiment, not musing on the human condition.

"Sorry." He said, handing Meghan the yardstick. like she'd asked him to "Spaced out there."

Her safety goggles bobbed on her head as she bent to get an exact measurement. She looked...different.

Granted, lab goggles made everyone look strange. No one really knew why the class had to wear them for an experiment with light, but Ms. Edel had been insistent that it would promote good laboratory habits. Yeah, humans definitely had weird fixations.

Still, there was no doubt about it. Something was different about his half-faery charge today. Something like light moving under smoked glass, bright and wavering just below the fogged surface, impossible to pin down to a single area but definitely present.

Being around humans for fifteen years had taught him more than he thought it would, but still so many things eluded him. Humans could lie (and often did) but still they managed to trust each other more than most fey Puck knew. Meghan broke promises at least once a week (usually unintentionally), but still she was able to keep all the promises that her mother and step-father never asked her to make: take care of Ethan when we're not there, don't do anything crazy after school, forgive us when we forget you.

"You're pretty amazing, princess."

"Huh?" Meghan raised her head, startled. "Oh no, I just did that on a calculator. I'm not _that_ good at math."

She laughed but sounded tired, as though the light breaking through the prism had broken her voice into all its different chromatic strands, each hue slowly fraying apart. Puck leaned in.

"Long day?"

Meghan sighed and half-smiled wryly, pushing her goggles back on top of her head when they drooped down. She looked like she was trying to laugh but was at the same time having difficulty swallowing something. "You could say that."

He stretched. "What happened?"

She stuck out her tongue as she changed the subject. "I had a bad dream that we hadn't finally finished _The Canterbury Tales _and had another sixty page reading assignment due. I'm not sure how much more Chaucer I could take."

"You'll like Shakespeare tomorrow better, trust me. Besides, you already know we're done with it now, so why the long face?" He joked, assuming the air of a photographer, going for all the angles, even going so far as to click an invisible camera (with sound effects) in an as over-the-top way as he could. Still, he couldn't provoke a giggle, or even a well-meaning swat.

"Wow. I used to think that not even a Chaucer-induced stupor could make you so immune to my Robbie Goddfell, Ace Paparazzo impression. Come on, what gives?"

"Nothing, Robbie."

Puck leaned back on the two hind legs of his lab stool, stroking his chin in mock-detection. If anyone else had done that to a piece of laboratory furniture, Ms. Edel would have been all over them. Glamour definitely had its privileges.

"Well, considering that sour look I'm getting, the fact that you _say_ you're upset about a bad dream about a class-"

"Rob, I'm not upset."

"-when you hardly ever have realistic dreams like that, hmm...bringing today's date into consideration." He widened his eyes in a moment of mock-epiphany. "Your family forgot your birthday again."

Her pen hit the desk with a plop. Puck noticed that her eyes seemed to gleam just like the prism had when the light hit it. "You didn't have to announce it to everyone."

Puck graced her with a mischievous grin, but grimaced inwardly. Way to be cavalier about sensitive topics and get the birthday girl to cry. Maybe he could still save this. "Well, good thing the reserve team caught the ball, otherwise this could have been a truly dolorous occasion. Missing a girl's fifteenth birthday? Absolutely unacceptable."

Meghan looked at him askance. Yes, there was definitely something different about her, but he still couldn't place it. Huh. You'd think as a guardian these things would be more apparent since he saw her on a day-to-day basis. It didn't seem like a bad thing, though. Maybe she did her hair a new way? That was always it, right? And why did it matter so much that she'd changed, anyway? That suddenly she-

He brushed that thought aside and continued with all the showmanship he could muster. And for a faery court jester (even one fifteen years out of practice), that was quite a lot.

"I was going to save this as a surprise for later, but I'm throwing you a party. Midnight tonight, meet me at the edge of your backyard. Don't worry about bringing anything; I've taken care of all the food and favors. Think nothing of it. And don't worry about getting dressed up for a gaggle of guests, it'll just be you and me."

He noticed that her mouth was open. Fifteen straight years of human contact and he still couldn't tell if that was a good sign or not.

-o-

"It's a little early to call it at this, wouldn't you say?" Puck scrutinized the vial as though it might break out of its glass. The liquid inside of it seemed clear but then became more and more opaque when swirled. "I mean, it's not like there's been any damage done already. She's not even curious about _me_ yet."

It shouldn't have hurt to say that. He should have been happy, elated even, that he'd done so well in concealing his true nature from her for all this time. But still, she hadn't even given him a second glance? Nothing in her had told her that something about him was strange?

The Erlking moved through the brush with a grace that seemed to make the very woods on edge, as though the silent Louisiana forest around them were on its best behavior, trying to be as respectful as it could. "I would ordinarily leave it up to your discretion, but given the circumstances, it seems I must intervene."

"Circumstances?" Puck balanced the little bottle on his finger deftly. "What circumstances? I'm as capable as I was before, probably even more so."

There was a pause. Oberon chose his words carefully. "She can see past some of the Mist, as you yourself have demonstrated with your rabbit trick. Though you did not mention it to me, it was brought to my attention nonetheless. It is never wise to leave a charge protected by only one guardian, especially a trickster."

Puck shrugged. Damn the nurse. He knew he could have been more careful driving Meghan crazy with that rabbit, but it had all been in fun and games, honestly. He couldn't see what the big deal was, other than a faery monarch getting his royal undergarments in a twist over Puck's teasing his daughter.

But then the Summer King's next line made him start: "Which is why I am requiring you to promise me that you will indeed give the Mistwine to Meghan Chase on her fifteenth birthday, if not sooner."

"What?" For a moment, Puck forgot the necessary civility due his king.

"It will be easiest coming from your hand than from any other." Oberon continued, his voice clear and concise, yet sharp like jagged glass. "The opportunities and the position of trust you have with her are difficult to duplicate. Of course, should you choose not to..."

Puck snorted. "I'd hardly be a fit for the title of trickster if I hadn't already surmised you'd have someone else do it if I backed out." He paused. He hated being hemmed in like this, forced to make promises. But if someone else had to do it instead, it would be uncountably worse. "Fine. My lord, your wish is my command."

-o-

Betrayal's a funny thing.

Dragonflies alighted on the water like jewels bouncing up and down on the surface of a mirror, searching for aquatic plants to their liking. Even though it was midnight, the lake seemed to radiate its own light from the reflection of the moon, so much so that it lit the mossy shores with a cool glow.

It was a pretty nice set up, Puck had to admit. Too bad he was setting up a half-faery princess he actually didn't mind all that much, but hey, a job's a job.

"Oh my God."

"Looks like the birthday girl finally made it to her party!" Puck crowed, spading his hands in his pockets and playing the part of exuberant host. It wouldn't do for her to catch on. "What took you so long?"

"This can't be behind my house." Meghan took in the lake, the picnic blanket Puck had set out and the neatly wrapped spread of food, the dance of the dragonflies and lightning bugs above the water. "This is just too..."

She trailed off. She was probably going to say "too nice" or "too much," both of which were false, in Puck's opinion. Still, she was right about one thing.

They definitely weren't in her backyard anymore. Puck had had to pull some strings, but seeing that expression on her face-oh man, it was all worth it.

Still, it proved his point. If Meghan Chase could really see through the Mist- all of it - she would have known for sure that something was up, something that would probably make her a lot more worried, or at the very least more curious, than she was. And that, insignificant though it seemed, got him scheming.

He stood in front of her, grinning like a Cheshire cat, hands behind his back teasingly. "Hey, come on. If a guy can't do something nice for his best friend on her birthday, then he's hardly a good friend. After all, it's..."

_Easiest coming from your hand than any other._

Puck trailed off.

Meghan broke out into a smile nonetheless, still sheepish and still looking very unsure of what to do with herself in her olive green cargo pants and self-consciousness, yet heartened. "Best friends," she repeated happily, "yeah. Rob, I'm so happy."

And then she did something that surprised him.

Not many things can surprise him. After a very long time of playing a lot of tricks on a lot of very clever people, he'd learned to spot tells like reading notes scribbled in the margins, never something strictly a part of the original, but always there on the side, saying exactly what he needed to know.

But thousands of years of experience still couldn't prevent him from being surprised by Meghan Chase, fifteen if a day, embracing him.

Of course they'd hugged before. He told himself that over again, wondering why his heart was beating so fast for _this_ girl of all girls, the child he'd been assigned to protect. But as he looked at her, he realized what had so eluded him before. Even calling her that was just...wrong. Meghan wasn't a child, someone he had to constantly entertain or shepherd places as a faery godparent. She'd become much more than that, not only older, but also more her own than his in every way.

And, as a princess-to-be, she was dancing more and more tantalizingly out of his reach.

"Will you promise that we'll always be best friends, Robbie?" She asked, a little quietly, but that could have been because she was talking into his shoulder.

He breathed in the scent of her hair. Even though it smelled mostly like the manufactured flowers of her shampoo, he still caught that same hint of faery magic spiraling off of it that had pulled him to her that first time on a bus, like a verdant forest in the center of a city. A little out of place but still there, spark enough in this dreary iron-filled world to draw him to her like a moth in pitch dark bewitched by a sudden fire.

Everyone was asking him to make promises and take oaths, and finally here was one he didn't think he'd mind.

_I think I'm making a mistake_, he wanted to whisper to her, but didn't. _This will be something I can't undo and you can't either. I think I've played myself too close to the game to not get caught up in it and escape unbound..._

"Yeah." He replied, just as softly.

They stayed like that for a while, until he noticed Meghan's heart start to speed up too, and she hastily broke away, pink-faced.

"Thanks again, for all of this," she stuttered and glanced around, anywhere but at him, and noticed the food again. "Oh wow! You even brought champagne? You really went all out! Way to get me to participate in underage drinking after I was so convinced I'd never get asked to a party." She laughed.

Puck's eyes immediately flicked to the flutes he'd set up on a rock by the blanket. He'd poured the champagne already and mixed the Mistwine into Meghan's glass (he'd denoted it with a pink ribbon- the same as he'd used to wrap her gifts- tied around the base) before she'd arrived. It would be so easy; she already held that fatal glass.

Well, not _fatal_ fatal. Metaphorically fatal, at best. No bodily harm done.

It would just be fatal to memory, really. And he had been prepared to accept that, hadn't he? She even looked happy. And after drinking all of it, she'd start to be noticed more; the fey effect of her blood would wear off and she'd probably make new, more human friends. She would never remember this party, and he'd become a nameless face from her youth. Fifteen years, what of it? Most people forgot their childhoods anyway, after a while. This wasn't anything special.

But as she raised it to her lips, Puck found that memory was the one thing he could not sacrifice now.

"Meghan, wait!"

Sure, she could see through most of the Mist, but not the important parts yet. She wasn't a threat to the Summer Fey, or Winter Fey, or really anyone for that matter. She was just a high school girl with little to no social life, classes he found unexplainably boring, and only one best friend who was about to vanish from her life forever.

Meghan gave him a puzzled look.

"We're supposed to toast." Puck chastised her. "And I didn't think you wanted to drink that huge fly in it, anyway."

He whisked away the flute and dumped it out before she could get a second glimpse, then washed it out thoroughly, and poured her a fresh glass.

"Good save," Meghan commented, still a little off-guard. "I didn't even notice. Yuck, what a way to start off fifteen, huh?"

Puck raised his own glass. "What are best friends for? Cheers, princess. Happy birthday."

Sure, he'd sworn to Oberon that he'd give her the Mistwine. He never swore that he wouldn't take it back, even if that wasn't what the Erlking had intended. But hey, betrayal's a funny thing, right? Some nights, you don't even know who you're going to double cross.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Notes<strong>:

Thanks so much to everyone for the reviews! I'm really glad that this has been so well-received thus far. I haven't yet read Summer's Crossing (lame full-time job/ generally busy summer), but if I do decide to include spoilers from that later, I'll make sure there's bold **spoiler!** text all over the place so you can avert your eyes if necessary.

Again, thanks! I love hearing what you think of the plot, scenes, writing, or whatever, especially if it helps you for school plays or makes you reconsider your team allegiance, lol! This is definitely a bit darker than most of the books, but I guess that's more my weird perception of Puck- how he can trick people so easily and yet somehow have these crazy-romantic feelings for Meghan- there's a lot of opportunities conflict there, I think.

Hope you liked this one! We officially move into the Iron King (no more pre-series! except for maybe a flashback or two) with the next chapter, so I hope you guys stick around.

-cy.


	4. The Rogue's Bargain

The air was like syrup in his throat, thick like molasses and too sickly sweet for him to swallow. Dust flaked it like frosting glimmering on a cake, like even looking at it would stab pangs of stale sweetness into his tastebuds.

Careful to check for night security, he lightly vaulted over the turnstiles that led into the Historic Voodoo Museum and sat in front of the display hanging over the entrance, his legs swinging back and forth, curious. The security cameras didn't cover this stretch of floor as well as other places, and he'd taken care to leave the guard watching them with a sufficient enchantment so that he wouldn't notice anything suspicious. Like, for example, a teen-aged boy spindling his legs in front of a statue of three seers, his eyes as predatory as a cat when it spots its mouse.

The dust motes here seemed almost in permanent suspension, as though the museum had been deserted for years rather than the six hours it had been since closing for the night. The particles in the air were still, as ready for casual inspection as the artifacts they floated above.

Puck smiled. Yeah, this was definitely the place.

"You know," he said conversationally, still vigorously kicking the air into motion, "you're going to run this place into the ground if you keep glamouring school teachers not to take their classes here. Museums don't run on kindness and intellectual interest alone. Money speaks volumes these days."

At once, the woman making up the left part of the oracle triad exploded into a maelstrom of dust and a low, guttural moan. It was as though every particle that had been resting in the air had been transformed into an angry insect, swirling in unison to swarm him, but Puck laughed, cover his mouth, and swatted them away playfully.

"Nice to see you've kept well." He commented.

The woman, after she had finished reassembling herself, sat on the far side of the turnstile and looked quite a bit more worse for wear. Though her eyes were dark holes that Puck couldn't see the ends of and her skin was wrinkled from her countless years like much-abused parchment paper, he could definitely tell that she was scowling.

"Puck," the oracle wheezed, still sending up bursts of dust as she arranged herself more comfortably, "how unfortunate. Why am I not surprised that it is always you who disturbs my rest?"

"Maybe it's because you can see me doing that in the future?" Puck asked innocently. "But hey, I make it a point to know where old friends are in the neighborhood. And who would have thought that you would choose to settle in New Orleans?"

She grumbled, waving her hand impatiently and dislodging a spider with the motion. She wanted him to get on with it.

But Puck would not be rushed. "So what is it you go by these days? Unless you want me referring to you the same way as when I found you that time in Delphi."

The oracle glowered, or as much as it was possible for a near-skeletal, eyeless face to. "Anna will do nicely."

"Anna, then." He swallowed. He'd come this far, found her out, now all that remained was to carry out the task. "Much as it's fun to renew old acquaintances, I didn't come here t-"

Anna exhaled in a laughing cough of dust and a sick, over-ripe smile, like something decaying would grin, its mouth stretching too far for the boundaries of its face. "You came, like everyone else who comes here, to make a bargain. So what is it you want this time, Robin Goodfellow?"

Another oracle, he knew, would not be powerful enough to grant him this request. Or if there were, then they would have wanted something more than what he was willing to offer for it. So it all came down to this.

Why, then, was he feeling like something had caught him by the heel and was trying to drag him back, keep him from going through with it?

-o-

They read through the play at Meghan's house. She sat on the window seat as he acted out his parts with great aplomb and then took her turn entering and giving her speeches. The play was_ A Midsummer Night's Dream_, which had nearly given Puck a heart attack when their English teacher asked him to read the part of, well, himself.

Their assignment was to read through the first act by Friday, so he and Meghan were having a study party to do it early. There was one read-through where Puck was somehow playing all the roles at once, which left Meghan in tears by the end of the first scene. When he voiced Titania in a high, cold falsetto with sharp endings and sneers, she had to make him stop, giggling so much that she gasped for breath.

"No way, no...way." Meghan shook her head, wiping tears away from her eyes. "The Queen of all the Faeries doesn't sound like _that_."

Puck put his hands on his sides in mock outrage and asked in the same high-pitched voice, "And how would _you_ know?"

Meghan doubled over again and he had to wait for her to calm down for her to reply. "I mean, I obviously don't, but aren't Faery Queens supposed to sound more elegant than that, like they drink fresh-squeezed honeysuckle, or braid their hair with vanilla leaves or something? Besides, it's not like you know either, Robbie."

_Actually_, Puck wanted to say, _you'd be surprised_. And, believe it or not, that had been his best Titania imitation yet.

-o-

"I want to be able to lie." He said, then quickly added: "Just once. A one-time special power I can choose where and when to use, but when I do use it, will grant me the ability to either tell an untruth or get myself out of a promise made in past or future. That's all."

He shrugged, holding his palms out as though to say: there, was that such an unreasonable thing?

The oracle's eye sockets widened. "That is quite a request. It goes against the very nature of the fey to lie. Promises are binding, vows once made-"

"-cannot be unmade, yes, I know." Puck finished darkly. "But," here he sighed dramatically, "if you can't do it, then I guess that's alright. I was thinking that since you'd lasted this long, making all those deals to get yourself more power and skirt death that maybe you'd have the ability, but even I can be wrong sometimes. Guess you aren't as powerful as-"

Anna held up a withered hand for silence.

"I did _not_ say that it was beyond my power." She began slowly, slightly miffed. "It is more that so many wish for it and yet they cannot afford to pay my price. For example, for a wish such as that, it would not be unreasonable to ask even your True Name..."

She trailed off, allowing it to sound like a question, but Robin Goodfellow was clever enough to know not to take the bait.

"Sorry, Anna, but try as you might, all the names you're going to get from me are the ones you already know. How about considering something a little different from your usual fare of names and memories?"

And with a flourish worthy of a sidhe of the Seelie Court, he drew out a very ragged and much put-upon-looking book. It had a comfortable air around it, like a house that had been lived in, or a broken-in pair of shoes, perfectly shaped to its owner. Leather bound up its spine, preserving it neatly, though the gilt letters that made up its title had started to fade.

"A Token." Anna said, trying to keep her voice dull and dismissive, but failing to disguise the sharp intake of breath she'd taken on seeing it. She'd want to haggle higher, he knew, but he could see the excitement creeping into her features as she leaned yet closer still. "Well, it would be a good start. But you would require something more than that to tempt me."

"I thought you were beyond temptation," Puck said piously, "but surely you're joking. Don't tell me that you can't sense what this is?"

Anna's brow furrowed, perturbed at the slight, even though it had been in jest. "Of course I can tell that it is a scholar's Token, that much is obvious. It is powerful, I will grant you that, but you will need something more than that to convince me that what you are offering is a fair trade."

"More?" Puck's eyebrows raised theatrically. "This is a scholar's Token, true. Each page is filled with a fervent devotion to the author's subject, almost like a man falling in love and finding more and more that he is powerless to resist the call of his beloved object. But to call it no more than that is a grievous oversight, unworthy of the book."

The oracle, he could tell, did not like being called unworthy of anything. She sniffed haughtily. "I do perhaps sense some muted undertones of some other emotions..." Her voice petered off, an invitation to further convince her.

Puck took it. "The man whose book this used to be was just that: a scholar of great renown, whose love throughout his academic years was just that, his subject and his work. But then, as fate would have it, he met someone just as passionate about his field as he was. They were to be married and would have been, but he wanted to complete his manuscript before then, as a testament to their shared love of learning.

"However, his sweetheart wished that they were not so idle. She could see a rift beginning to open up between them when she attempted to distract him doing his working hours. One day while late at work, she was spirited away to Faery for a time. She was bewitched by beautiful sights, as they say, and even fell in love with a faery herself. Oberon found out, and quicker than thinking, she was sent back to the mortal realm. You probably know how it goes from there. She either ate nor drank, and when it came to her betrothed..."

Puck shrugged, putting on a melancholy air.

"Ah. I did detect an undertone of grief." Anna said softly.

"The man strove on after the loss, finishing his masterpiece. At last, he realized what a wonderful person he had been on the verge of being with forever, though he had lost his chance. The dedication is to her and the cycle of emotions contained within the pages mirrors their relationship: from joy to reckless determination to sorrow at the end, it is all indexed by page number for your convenience."

He bowed, as a storyteller would completing a tale.

Anna appeared to be considering something most heavily. "It is certainly a potent Token."

On hearing this, Puck laughed. "It's so potent that it's more or less a collection of smaller Tokens all bound together. Truly, one of a kind."

He saw the last bit of resistance fade in her eyes and took his chance.

"So do we have a deal?"

And once again, like seeing a jack-o-lantern's carved face rot in fast-forwarded time, she smiled.

-o-

The amusement park's rides glinted in the sun, like they were pieces of molten rock candy, lapsing into a slow melt.

They were here not because either of them had invited the other, but more because the school was doing a freshman outing at the end of the year to celebrate and encourage them to be more friendly with each other. Puck has always been a little curious about theme parks and what better chance was there to see what the fuss was about?

Threads of sugar drifted along the breeze from the cotton candy machine, like strays from a spinner's loom. He could even feel the iron throbbing at him from the rides; luckily Meghan wasn't all that fond of them, either. He'd gone on a rollercoaster to prove that he could, but the long lines seemed to keep them away, which was good.

The two of them walked through a house of mirrors, went on a haunted mine cart ride (also very metallic, but the bus had been good training), and even spun around in teacup-shaped cars. Wandering through the midway, both slightly soaked from standing outside the water rides and watching people go down them, they stopped at a fishing game whose prizes caught Meghan's eye.

"What do you say, princess?" Puck teased. "Think you can take me on in a wholesome game of fishing?"

Meghan cocked an eyebrow, spading her hands in her khaki cargo pants. "When is anything wholesome with you? You're probably going to pull some dirty trick, but sure, I'll bite. Be prepared to lose, Robbie. I have years of farm experience on my side."

Though he wooed the plastic fish with the magnetic sinker deftly, Puck had to admit that Meghan wasn't bluffing. When at last they'd managed to secure their fish, the man behind the counter whistled as he examined the stickers on the undersides of their catches.

"Well now, looks like we have some winners!" He squinted at both fish. "Hate to break it to ya, sir, but your friend's a natural."

Puck's eyes widened as Meghan was instructed to choose which of the massive stuffed animals she wanted. Puck, in the meantime, was content with his glowstick crown, though it seemed somewhat meager when compared to the mammoth sea creature that Meghan walked out with.

"How on earth did you get so good at fishing?" He frowned. "Your family keeps pigs, not trout last time I checked."

"Well, sometimes important stuff falls into the pig pen and you don't want to have to glove up to get it out." Meghan replied, barely able to get her arms around the huge animal. "You just get really good at winding a wire around objects that are stuck in mud. Like this one time my mom dropped her watch in there- it was pretty gross."

"At least I beat you at skeeball." Puck said.

"That's only because I'm out of practice."

"Yeah, sure, whatever you say, prin-"

"Hey!"

Puck stopped. A man who had been woozily weaving through the midway kiosks had walked into Meghan and was now looking at her angrily. He was bald and his face and upper arms, like many other park-goers, were burnt red from the sun. Meghan's stuffed animal had flopped onto the ground.

"Why don't you watch where you're going, missy?" Puck noticed that he slurred the "s"'s and smelt slightly of alcohol. Great, he thought, just after we were having such a good time. But then man was not done. He grabbed hold of Meghan's arm and she flinched. "I demand an apology for you for...," he paused, "for being so-o-o-o rude." He drew out the "so" for what seemed an inestimable amount of time.

"Let her go." Puck said, stepping closer. "It's your own fault you bumped into her and made her drop what she was holding." Humans, honestly. You'd think that some of them thought they were the kings of the park.

But the man wasn't seeing reason.

"Oh, look, got yourself a knight ion shining armor to protect you, huh?" The man taunted, pulling Meghan so suddenly that she stumbled. Puck knew what this was all about. Male-to-male power brokering, this jerk's way of showing him who was top dog around here. Happened all the time at school. But even though he could understand what was happening, Puck still heard his voice come out in a growl.

"I sat, let her go."

"What," the man leered back, "gonna fight me?"

Puck was faster than he'd even though he'd be. A breath after the man had uttered those words, he'd wrestled Meghan's arm away as the man suddenly started to fight what looked like a massive black bird. Meghan looked back hastily over her shoulder as a theme park security guard sauntered over. By that time, the bird must have flown away, because the man was very stupidly looking at a twig and a leaf he'd grabbed in his hand.

Puck handed Meghan back her stuffed animal.

"Wow, Robbie." Meghan gulped, rubbing her arm. "That was crazy. I know you like those kung fu animes, but this was something else. Are you secretly taking classes or something?"

"He's just drunk." Puck threw a seething glare over his shoulder as the man was now arguing vehemently with the officer. Abruptly, he turned back to Meghan. "Are you okay?"

"Umm...yeah." She replied. "It's just that I've never seen you like that, so..."

His heart was beating strangely, as though there were some strange thread between them, as soft and thin, volatile as cotton candy contorting on the breeze, yet drawing him closer and closer to her until-

"Such an idiot." Puck murmured into her hair, arms tightening around her.

He wished he was more certain whether he'd meant the man or himself.

-o-

"Why lying?" Anna mused. "Answer me this in addition to that book of yours, and I'll grant you one lie. One. I'd say be careful not to waste it, but I hardly need to warn someone like you. Besides, I'll enjoy seeing you come to me later begging to reverse it. So why a lie?"

"You can see that that's what I'm going to do?" He was still smiling, though his gut twisted at her words. "Come back and ask you to make it go away?"

Anna frowned dismissively, unwilling to say more. "Our bargain was for the lie, not my reasoning. Why do you say you need it so much?"

Puck smirked. "Isn't it obvious? I have something I need to get out of."

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Notes<strong>:

Wow, thanks everyone for the great advice and comments!

I know I said that this chapter was going to take go into the Iron King, but then I realized that I needed to get these scenes out of the way for plot reasons. Technically, this was going to be part of Chapter 3, but that ended up getting so big that I made it its own deal. So, next chapter for real will start the behind-the-scenes story arc.

Thanks again for reading and hope you like this!

-cy.


	5. The Rogue's Dagger

Falling from grace, he thought, sounds more like a cat elegantly twisting through the air to land on its feet rather than what the words really meant to convey: tumbling, hurtling, spasming between ground and sky, and the sickening inevitability of impact.

The nurse's office was quiet, dark. Meghan was here under the pretense that she had suffered a massive migraine and all the lights were off; no visitors were admitted except him and now that classes were done for the day, his objective was to smuggle her out of school without doing any more damage to her ego or having her spirited off by Seelie, Unseelie, or otherwise parties.

Puck sighed. Whatever happened to those normal, uneventful birthdays where everyone forgot that she existed and didn't sic computers on her (admittedly, ill-chosen) crush or have her faery father demanding that she forever be cut off from the magic that was her birthright? Let alone forgetting everything- but most importantly forgetting him, Robbie Goodfell, pretend human and not-pretend best friend.

Or, at least, so he thought. With his status of best friend he knew he'd give up many things, sure. But, ultimately, any rogue always has self-preservation in mind. Promises were the only things that could hold him down and though he had a lie, he'd have to choose which promise he wanted to escape from carefully.

Breaking a vow to serve Oberon seemed useless: as a Summer fey, he knew all things would come back to Arcadia for him one way or another. Other vows, though, were more pliable.

A promise to be a best friend, for example, that was just about as lifelong and requirement as much commitment as if he'd-

-but he hadn't made her _that_ kind of promise. And if things went the way they were going, he never would. So what use was there in treating this friendship with the same devotion normally reserved for something so much greater?

He watched her lips part and meet as she breathed.

Puck thrived in deceitful complication, twisting situations to his benefit, but weird as it was to say it, here when he should be feeling more comfortable about a faery version of Meghan Chase, he was starting to miss those silly inflatable castles at birthday parties and acquiring cakes for her when her parents forgot.

Happiness, he thought as he gently brushed a strand of hair away from Meghan's eyes, seemed so much easier to attain then. His fingers wanted so badly to follow the curve of her face, but a sound halted him.

"Thought you went home for the day." Puck's eyes glinted too-green as the nurse, in her human guise, stood by the office door.

"I'm on my way out." She noted, quirking a brow at her patient. "Hmm. I would have expected her to be awake by now, considering the dosage of the herbal potion I gave her, but I guess it can't be helped."

"'Can't be helped?'" Puck repeated, acerbic. "What if you put her to sleep for a decade? Fat chance even I'll be able to guard Sleeping Beauty that long."

"Sometimes," the nurse retorted knowledgeably, in a voice not to be overridden, "people just want to stay asleep. Even without a sleeping potion, they'll linger just outside of reality in the effort to make a bad experience go away. That girl's had quite the day of bad experiences, as you'd do well to remember, Robin. And, as you're likely to drag her into many more, I suggest you let her rest as long as she needs to."

Puck felt ire sear the tip of his tongue. How on earth did one gnome matron predict him better than centuries of sidhe and mortals when it came to Meghan? It was uncanny.

"Now," the nurse continued primly, "as I was saying before, his lordship will likely have you give her the mistwine soon. The computers yesterday were something, but it seems more forces have been set into motion now. It will only get worse and worse the longer you delay."

"I know, I know." He replied, curt, never taking his eyes off Meghan's face, even as the door closed behind the nurse and she reminded him to lock it.

Plans, thoughts throbbed through his head, heavy like fathoms of roiling waves crushing him down to the sea floor, rendering him immobile with their weight. Implications and schemes were regarded and discarded in turn as he rested his forehead on the bedpost, the cool touch of the wood comforting and familiar.

He took a deep breath and eyed the clock. They were running out of time.

About to grab Meghan by her shoulders and gently shake her awake, he was surprised to see her eyelids flutter open.

"Hey, princess." Instantly, switching back to his regular teasing tone, he grinned, hoping she hadn't seen his joker mask slip. "Welcome back to the world of the living. How'd you like being a zombie? Should I try it or is it all just hype?"

"Rob." She said, blankly, as though establishing this as fact. Her face seemed like it had been worn down by sea and sand as she sat up and sighed. "'World of the living', huh? After today, zombie life is starting to look pretty good. I'm really not sure how much I want to go back."

Ooh, dramatic.

He would be more interested in the hardships of the teenage soul, Puck thought, if there weren't an innumerable amount of faeries hot on their heels, just waiting and salivating themselves silly at the thought of getting their hands on Meghan, either for use as a bargaining chip or for their own dark purposes. Hell, hadn't he even seen ice boy out in the woods this morning? Never a good sign to have Mab's number one son skulking around-

But Meghan spoke again and its sound pulled on his heart like it was only so many strings her fingers had happened to brush across, resonating like one of Leanansidhe's fine instruments.

Her voice was slipping, as though it were releasing its last grip on control and sliding into the raspy abyss of untamed vocal chords and mania. "The pictures they made, that they would go through so much effort to wreck my life." She swallowed, eyes red and prickling with tears, her breath coming fast. "God, Robbie, I've never had anybody hate me before! I thought being ignored was the worst, not having anyone care, but this, getting singled out like this, I'll have to transfer schools, probably even move... I never wanted it to be like this, I can't live this down..."

"Hey," he said softly, stroking her hair, cautious at first then more sure of himself. _We have to leave. Just forget about it, princess. If you want, I'll turn them all into rats and you can laugh at them until your stomach's sore. Besides, they're not all that important anyway._

He felt the words forming on his tongue, quick as always, when she threw herself abruptly around him.

As fast as the words had come, they faded, dissolving in his mouth like cheap candy. And maybe that's what they were, when he thought about it. Everything he said was engineered to appease, enrapture, or persuade, from the sweetest blandishments to his most tart of teases. When had he last said anything he truly meant?

He could only think of a handful of occasions, most of them promises, and one of which he'd been debating going back on.

So, for once, Puck said nothing and tricked no one. He just held a newly sixteen-year-old girl lightly to his chest and breathed softly, his body saying for him all the words Meghan needed: that he was still here._  
><em>

She clung at him, as one falling from a great height, and cried.

-o-

Maybe it was the tears, he thought as he walked back "home" from the bus stop (it wasn't like there was an actual home involved, he just tended to walk along the roadside and vanish into the greenery), kicking at small, gravel stones. Maybe it was just the damned tears that were making him feel this way, making him even consider this...

Delaying the mistwine was one thing, but outright refusing to give it to her, well... it would certainly make for interesting gossip back in the Nevernever, that was for sure.

Puck avoided looking at the woods as he walked. If he had, he would have seen the beckoning hands of trees trying to draw him in, the willows whispering that the Erlking was expecting him, that the ruler of the Summer Kingdom was close by, infusing the very air with life in the middle of autumn. He could tell they were excited, energized by the idea of passing Summer royalty, but he certainly wasn't.

He already knew how the trees would shiver at his monarch's presence. He'd seen it enough before. They didn't say "Oberon passing fell and wrath" for nothing.

At least the nurse hadn't seen him add a touch of pig to that cheerleader, so maybe there was something good about today after all.

"Robin."

Scratch that.

"You ignored my summons." The Erlking rose out of the woods as though on a tide of tree branches and leaves. Puck hadn't thought that his liege would make his presence known so close to a road, but then again, Ash had done it. Maybe it was becoming a fashion amongst royals today: do stupid things and make your Puck clean up after you.

Puck bowed good-naturedly."What, me forget a summons? Impossible."

Thunder rumbled overhead, as though in preparation for a summer storm. Oberon's eyes were thinned with a coldness reminiscent of lightning, the electricity not caring what it struck down so long as it had its means to the ground, as long as its conditions were met for stability. Oberon was a lot like that, the forked lightning seeking least resistance in accomplishing his tasks.

"I will not ask for an oath," the Summer King intoned, "since you seem so set on skirting them whenever given the chance. But know this, Robin, the consequences of Meghan Chase gaining the Sight are dire. If you do not do as you were bid then be forewarned that not even being the favorite of the Summer Court can save you from chastisement."

"Duly noted." Puck replied darkly, eyes still fixed on the gravel road leading to Meghan's house. "Guess I should get going, then."

-o-

And see? Look what happened when he left her alone: ambush by changeling and serious leg injury. Honestly, if Oberon was so dead set against his daughter finding out about Faery, or really staying alive at all, then his best bet was to schedule meetings with Puck at crucial moments and stop him saving her from the bad guys.

Meghan's hair fanned out around her like an angry golden halo as she lay on the couch, twisted and almost sinister in the semi-dark of the living room. It seemed to him the color of luxury, all the precious metals in the world mixed into an unholy alloy. He felt avaricious and angry all at the same time- how could anyone hurt her, knowing how displaced she was between Faery and this world? Moreover, how could anyone hurt her knowing she was under _his_ protection and that there would be hell to pay?

She'd accepted the mistwine without comment. He hadn't wanted to give her too much, but a little had been necessary. Oberon was right: her Sight was strong enough to withstand the effects- Puck'd seen it develop much more rapidly during her fifteenth year than ever before- she'd have to drink quite a portion in order to really forget everything for good. Which was good, but did pose a problem in getting her to relax.

Because really, how could anyone be expected to sleep when they knew their normally docile little brother had treated their leg as no more than a light snack of chips and salsa?

"So, princess," he said, sprawled out along the loveseat, "it feels like I'm always playing Prince Charming, waking you up from your myriad slumbers."

Meghan lurched forward and stared at him.

"What happened? What..." Her brows knit in confusion. "What was that thing?"

Puck grinned sheepishly. "Oh boy. You ask some real kickers when you wake up, you know that? But then again, for a friend of mine, you sure don't like being tricked."

Meghan stuck her tongue out and winced as she tried to put weight on her injured leg. "It's because you play so many tricks that I have a deeper appreciation for the truth than most people. So, tell me, Robbie. What happened to Ethan? Why'd he go ballistic and bite my leg? Truthfully," she added emphasis to the word, "what's wrong with him?"

"Truthfully?" Puck repeated, amused, balancing the empty vial of mistwine on the tip of his finger so that it caught the light. "Truthfully, princess, there are some things that you're probably better off not knowing. Some things in this crazy world of ours you can't just shut out once you've seen; it becomes a part of you. You only have the chance to say yes or no once, and your choice in that one, wild moment determines your destiny. Funny, huh?" He flicked the bottle up and caught it deftly. "It all happens in a flash."

He nodded to her bandaged calf. "Oh, and be careful walking on that. You still need some time to recover, but at least you'll keep the leg."

"Keep the leg?" Meghan repeated his words incredulously. "Look, Robbie, we've been best friends for as long as I can remember. More than ever I've gotten the feeling that you know a whole lot more about what's going on than I do. And, if it's going to help me bring Ethan back to normal and not trying to kill me or my mom, then I want to know what's happening."

Puck set the bottle down and turned away from her, his face hidden in the shadows cast by the kitchen lights. "Do you really mean that? Remember what I said about only getting one chance. Really think about it. I can make you forget everything that happened: the people at school won't remember today, your brother will seem a little snotty, but you'll see him as normal. You'll have," he paused, "other friends at school. You could have everything that you've wanted."

"Or," he looked back at her over his shoulder, a strange fire in his eyes, making him seem half-wild himself, "you can have the truth."

Meghan shivered.

He couldn't blame her. He was shivering, too, though he was trying hard not to show it. Here he was, defying centuries upon centuries of subservience and good favors, all for a human girl he'd risked so much to keep from forgetting him, and now he'd handed her her own destiny. If she chose to forget, he would be powerless to stop her, all his hard work undone by the one he was trying to save. It was like defending someone and then pointing his dagger at himself, waiting for her say or whether or not he should strike.

Heart pounding, he watched as Meghan took a deep breath and seemed to compose herself.

"What do you take me for?" She seethed. "I mean, come on!"

Puck stepped back a pace. He certainly hadn't expected this.

"I'm not going to just let Ethan stick his hand into ovens or trip Mom and pretend that it's all okay." Meghan rounded on him like a fury. "And since when did it become okay for you to keep stuff from me? We're best friends for crying out loud, doesn't that mean anything to you? No matter how weird or life-altering you say they might be, I don't want there to be secrets between us, Robbie."

Puck was caught half-way between shock and laughter. Hysterics had never been something he was prone to, but at this moment, he felt himself lapsing dangerously close to them in his glee.

"Alright, you win. But don't say I didn't warn you." His eyes danced with a strange mirth. "Some of my secrets are a lot darker than you think."

Meghan rolled her eyes. "Try me."

And with that, he gave into uninhibited gales of laughter. He might be falling, sure, but he was going to enjoy the weightlessness of the free-fall every chance he got.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note<strong>:

Thanks to everyone for reading! I'm so glad that people are liking this! I reworked this one a lot since I wasn't sure what scenes I wanted to include, but I'm pretty happy with the final product. My job's been a little intense, so this took a little longer than I thought it would.

Enjoy and, as always, it's great to hear from you guys!

-cy.


	6. The Rogue's Unmasking

"You remember that you did say 'try me.'" Puck whispered, almost loud enough for Meghan to hear as she sobbed into his chest. "There are always consequences to challenges like that, princess, and they're rarely pretty ones."

Sacrifice was just another part of the game. She didn't know it, but he'd been a player on this board longer than he'd care to admit. Faeries got trapped into revealing things, secrets they wanted kept secret; it just happened when you dealt with humans. The only thing was, sometimes you didn't know what you were giving up until it was too late to stop.

Meghan certainly hadn't known that she would see a doppelganger skitter across Ethan's bedroom floor like a carnivorous insect, or that her bid for her little brother to act normally again and convince her that he really wasn't a changeling would backfire like this, in bites on her leg and an attack from under the bed. Puck couldn't say that he was surprised. Changelings were a nasty lot, especially when newly installed, and he had dealt with them enough to know that getting rid of them quickly was often the best way of handling them.

But hey, you know what they say, right? Knowledge always carried a price tag, and often a steep one.

Any trickster could tell you that. Between telling Meghan who he was and was not, his course should be obvious. So why, in the name of every lacy undergarment that Titania owned, was he teetering on the edge of this decision, on the verge of making the same slanted choice between knowledge and bliss that Meghan had made less than an hour before, the consequences already before him (girl in tears, guardian fey disobeying powerful liege, the list went on), wasn't he at least wise enough just to leave it alone?

Especially since it had made her end up like this, sobbing into his shoulder for what felt like an eternity of moments and small, snuffling sounds. How many times had this happened already? First at her school, then with her shock at what had happened to Ethan and her mother, and now this.

He'd never wanted her to cry.

Puck's hands covered Meghan's still-shaking shoulders, smoothed the sheets of silvery-blond hair back from her face and behind her ears as much as he could. "You've been through a whole lot," he murmured and then held her back, a rueful smile creeping over his lips, "but, in true best friend fashion, I'm going to ask you to go through a little more for my sake, okay?"

Meghan backed away, her brow furrowed, eyes dark and questioning. She looked almost afraid. Puck grinned. Yeah, fear was right. He would have been a little disappointed in her if she didn't see this coming, and fear was most definitely the correct response when a Puck was concerned.

But it wasn't like he wasn't nervous, too. This could be an error of blindness or the most brilliant move he'd ever make, but he would never know unless he took the chance. And Robin Goodfellow was never one to balk from testing his luck. Not with this much riding on it.

"What do you know about me?" He said quietly, his green eyes dancing with an odd intensity. "Think about it, Meghan. What do you really know about me, about who I am?"

They stared at each other for a while, each on the edge of a precipice.

His shirt still bore the wet, apostrophe-shaped spots from where Meghan's face had been pressed into it, after she'd gone back into Ethan's room by herself. Wearing her tear marks, he felt like a signpost for weakness, for the one comfortable place left to her in an increasingly uncertain world. Meghan had held onto him like she was drowning, like he was the last remnant of her normal life, the final rock of sanity left for her as the earth crumbled all around her.

And here he was, casting her off into thin air, forcing her to either fall or fly.

"Not much, right? You don't see me unless it's here, or at school, or when we meet up somewhere. You've never been to my house, or met my parents, and you've never asked to. Remember?" His voice was edgy and a strange electricity crackled through him. Meghan might be scared, might be shaking her head, but he was a rush of energy, deceit and artifice fall away from him even as he peeled back his glamour. "You've known all along that there was something more to me, something not quite right, but you never asked any questions. Now I want you to ask."

She didn't want to, he could tell. Meghan had backed up against the hallway wall, her mouth open and her chest rising a falling with quick breaths. She was like a sparrow caught indoors, drying its mouth out and anxious to get out even though all the windows were shut. It hurt him to see her like this, knowing that it was him doing it to her.

Why? Maybe it was just something that he couldn't give up, the wildness. He wasn't supposed to be safe; he definitely wasn't supposed to be the kind of faery you came to in your darkest moments and cried on. Or, at least, the Puck that he had been wasn't that kind of faery. He was the guy that made mortals' lives more difficult for no reason at all beyond personal enjoyment and he tricked the highest and mightiest of fey royalty because he liked the thrill of wondering if he could get away with it. That was what a Puck did.

That was what _he_ did.

Meghan had to know that. Only now, there was a significant part of him wanting to cut it out, leave her her silly misconceptions and battered thoughts. But when that part grappled with the side of him desperate for his sixteen-year-charade to end, it faltered.

"I have to know." He said in a low voice.

"What?" Meghan's hands gone white as she gripped the wall, as though it would steady her, provide her some stability now. Puck shook his head, stepping closer to her even though she trembled.

What indeed. "Well, how about this, princess: could you really see a prankster for what he really was? And would you even want to still be with him afterwards, once all his secrets were out?" He whispered, tucking a shivering blond wisp of hair behind her ear.

Meghan swallowed and he could see her throat tremble. He knew that she wouldn't be able to answer, not with words anyway, and his time was growing short. The glamour was unwinding.

Something knocked at the door downstairs, begging to be let in, and Puck begged himself to let it through, shivering in anticipation of the change. It had been so long since he'd let anyone in, let alone wanted to.

"Can you handle what I am, princess? Can you even begin to?"

Her lips were forming into something, maybe words, maybe a scream, but he never found out what. Any reply she might have made was stolen with her breath in the moment that Puck let go, let the exhilaration rip through him, felt the beating of bird's wings tear at him like a second heartbeat.

Distantly, the door downstairs flew open and a swarm of ravens circled him, as enthralled by him as he was them. Black feathers danced along the woodwork, caressed the walls and ceiling of the hallway, got caught in all the light fixtures and blotted the ceilings lights out, melted in and out of him like an ancient song. This was frenzy, he knew; his eyes closed with a sigh of release, and when that one speck of brilliant green vanished, his irises lost to the shudder of wings and dark bodies, he left no trace of himself behind, just a whirl of ravens racing to the door and that black, downy fluff that binds feather stem to bird.

He heard Meghan calling his name, the one she'd always called him by, but he was far beyond an answer.

Maybe if he chased her gasp far enough on the wind he rode out the door, he'd find out what she'd been about to say- if, maybe this half-fey, half-human slip of a girl could see him as he truly was.

-o-

Sacrifices were a game of give and take. They were a lot like contracts, when he thought about it, except they were a lot less beyond anyone's, faery or mortal's, ability to control. Maybe that was why he was fascinated by them. Humans, the threat of losing something precious, all of it.

The stairs were the same as they had always been when he came over to visit Meghan. Still wood, still creaky in some places, especially the fifth and eleventh steps, with that sharp nick in the banister that had been there ever since he'd convinced Meghan to ride down the stairs with him on her stuffed animals, and they'd crashed. Now, covered with a layer of dark feathers, they looked as though they'd been caught in a snowstorm, that a strange, inverse winter had descended on the Chase home, and he was a lone figure slogging through it.

He reached the top of the landing and looked around. She wasn't there anymore, but he hadn't expected her to be. Rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, Puck sighed. It could have been gentler- _he_ could have been gentler about it.

But it was done. Meghan had to know what she was getting into, and if she was serious about going into Faery to rescue her brother, then he'd be damned if he didn't send her in with full knowledge of who he was. She had to get used to this, even if it was brutal and shattering, he'd rather that he be the one telling her what she was up against, what she had to deal with, rather than she face it in the Nevernever unprepared.

Puck closed his eyes, reaching out with a small, flowering strand of glamour, something comforting but with a memory of pain at first touch, maybe a rose branching towards her. Slowly, he approached her room and paused before the door.

This might be the moment where she tells him that she never wants to see him again. That, despite what she said earlier, she doesn't want his help, doesn't want to go after her brother after all, doesn't want anything to do with him, would rather that he kindly leave the mistwine at the threshold and run out of her life forever.

His hands gripped the doorframe before he knew it, steadying himself, his forehead resting against the closed door. His breaths came softly, warmth on the wood. It's oak, reassuring and clam, steadfast, a place of rest and safety.

He knocked on the door once, twice, then opened it. A Puck can sometimes be very out of place, too, and that is perhaps one of his biggest secrets. Sometimes, no matter what gallery of smiles he has in stock, he has no idea what to say, what to do.

Especially not now, not when Meghan Chase, the girl he initially disliked and now would and _had_ risked everything for, looked up at him from under her coverlets, her eyes red-rimmed and her face streaked with tears. And it was he would had put them there.

Puck wasn't quite sure what made him do it. Probably something human he'd picked up somewhere, something he caught on a late night made-for-TV movie that he watched with Meghan maybe, or just an action and reaction pair that he'd seen played out enough to mimic.

He sat on the bed, held her, still wrapped up in her comforters and shaking, pulled her close to him and rested his head against hers, as though to say: there are many things that are lost to you and many still to come, but this will never be one of them.

-o-

Puck laughed, feeling the glamour kick into him like a deluge on parched land. A part of him reeled, crowed out that never again was he going to the mortal realm, taking himself out of Faery and denying himself this for that long. This rush of power was too much not to want to lose himself in it again, go crazy with all of it pulsing through his veins.

Cocking his head, he shrugged out of his mortal clothes and into something more appropriate for visiting Faery. If he was going to parade through Arcadia with Meghan Chase, he might as well piss Oberon off as little as possible. He had a feeling in his gut that he had already pushed his luck too far.

Meghan's eyes went wide when she caught sight of him, her best friend's trademark smirk echoed in a slightly different face, his piercing green eyes dancing with merriment and the hint of a joke.

"Well, what do you think, princess?" Puck struck a pose, the same that he'd used to make Meghan laugh for years, achingly familiar. "You saw the raw me, but this is more like how I am normally. You know, when I'm not tailing you through school and stuff." He winked.

Was it just him, or did Meghan's cheeks look a little flushed? Puck felt his heart speed up a little bit, still holding onto his playful smile, giving no sign that something she'd done had affected him. Being a Puck meant keeping some things secret.

"You look..." Meghan paused, all the right words escaping her. "Right, I think. Like this is where you belong. You always did seem a little too perfect for school, Robbie." She laughed at the end, as though recalling a fond memory. "I think some girls wondered why you always hung out with someone like me."

Puck smiled to himself, a little impressed at humans' abilities to see through some masks and not through others. "Then they clearly weren't looking at you the right way, princess." He said softly.

"What, Robbie?"

He shook his head, the smile remaining but faded. He wouldn't allow himself to rush this. Not yet, not after he'd waited so long. He could keep a secret a little longer.

"Actually, princess," he swept into an elaborate bow, "Robbie's more a nickname of mine. You can just call me Puck."

Some things were still secrets. But, though it still unnerved him, he was finding that he wanted her to know more and more of them.

-o-

**Author's Note:**

Hey guys, sorry that this took so long. This summer and fall have been pretty rough. I lost someone very important to me and a lot of things have become more difficult. But, I am trying to get back into this. Again, sorry for the huge delay and thank you so much for sticking with me as I try and sort through all of this and get everything back in order.

I'm so glad that this fic has made you guys happy and I'm hoping that, as the story goes on, it will continue to do so. Thanks for reading!

-cy.


	7. The Rogue's Truth

The gnarled lamps flickered along the walls as Meghan drew the chipmunk coverlets closer, like the light were shivering in tandem with her. She tried hard not to think of her blankets as the skins of formerly living, cute rodents, but even though the feelings of exhaustion from a long day of travel and relief at finding a warm bed began to set in, she still could not set herself at ease.

Everything was so strange here.

Her hands still bore some red stains from the berries they'd had for dinner, still a little sticky as they smoothed out the blankets. She was glad that she hadn't been so adventurous as to try the grubs that Twiggs had brought out. There were some things about this world that she was not yet ready to experience, maybe not ever. All she wanted was to find Ethan and get out.

Meghan Chase sighed and fell back onto her bed.

No, that wasn't it. Of course she wanted to find her younger brother, but she would be lying if she said she would be happy to leave the Nevernever. Robbie- no, Puck- had said that there would be dangers here, but apart from the danger of being a little grossed out at dinner, it hadn't seemed so bad. In fact, she kinda liked...

"Sleeping yet, princess?"

Robin Goodfellow poked his head into Meghan's field of vision. Meghan started, then rolled her eyes, and sat up.

"I'm never going to be able to sleep with you bothering me, Robbie." She stuck her tongue out, falling easily back into their old routine until something hit her about her reply. Things were different now.

She swallowed and drew the blankets a little closer, wary of the chipmunk claw still attached to the skins. Puck cocked his head.

"What's with the weird face? I didn't disturb your beauty sleep, did I?" He made a woeful face, hand raised to forehead in mock distress. "Anything but that."

Meghan couldn't help but smile. "It's kinda strange to me that you're still the same."

Puck snorted. "What, me be anything other than your goofball best friend? I hope you're joking, princess, because asking me not to be like this is an awfully tall order."

Actually, it really would just take one order, one command that he no longer uphold his promise to be her best friend and he would be free. Oberon would be ticked, but the promise Puck had made to the Summer King expired a while ago. He wouldn't even have to use that lie that he bargained for with the oracle or anything. One careless little command from Meghan Chase and everything was back to the way it was meant to be.

The truly strange thing about tonight was that Puck wasn't quite sure that that was what he wanted anymore.

"No, I mean," Meghan rolled the words around in her mind a little as though tasting the bouquet of a fine wine, "I mean that you're not Robbie. Robbie was a lie, wasn't he? Just an identity that you took on so you could pretend to be a human. You're not him. You're...Puck."

Still smiling but with the wattage significantly dimmer, Puck moved a little closer to Meghan on the bed. "Don't say it that way, you'll make me think you're disappointed."

"I'm sorry." Meghan shook her head, waves of blond hair running across the blankets like rogue streams. "I'm not. Disappointed, I mean. It's just that it's like I'm meeting you for the first time, like you're a totally different person from the guy who was my best friend." She frowned. "Well, who I thought was my best friend."

"Oh, is that it?" Puck stood, paused a moment, and the whirled around and rested his elbows on her knees, propping his chin up. "Truth or dare, princess. Here's a truth. I am every bit the same person you've known all these years, the same person who promised to always be your best friend, as I am Lord Oberon's jester and a singularly capable faery. It's up to you whether you see it that way or not. But it doesn't stop it from being true." He grinned, a little dangerously, a mix of the Robbie she'd known all those years and that strange, wild creature lost to magic she'd glimpsed on her stairs back home.

Meghan swallowed.

"So," Puck still was looking her with hints of a challenge creeping into his voice, "your turn. Truth or dare?"

She pursed her lips. Robb-Puck shouldn't even have to ask this. He already knew everything there was to know about her anyway, and it wasn't like she'd choose a different answer than the one she normally did.

"Truth."

"What are you thinking?" Puck asked. "Seriously. I don't care if you're grossed out by the fact that I ate a bug or whatever, I want to know what's going on in your head right now."

Giggling, Meghan fake-gagged at the memory for R-Puck's benefit and then frowned. This was getting ridiculous. It wasn't like she could change how she thought about someone in a few hours, not when they'd been with her her whole life, at least as long as she could remember. No one could do that.

"Time's a-wasting, princess." Puck smiled down at her expectantly. "What, you gonna chicken out?"

"Like I ever do." Meghan retorted, rising to the taunt. "I guess it's just you."

"Me?" Puck looked genuinely surprised. Meghan had seen his look of pretend-surprise many times over; you hardly went a day being around Robbie without him feigning astonishment about some grand prank he'd just pulled off. This was different. She wasn't sure if she'd ever seen this look before.

"Yeah." She continued hastily, as though scared that if she stopped she might lose her footing, not be able to continue where she left off. "Everything is really weird here. And not in a bad way, it's just, well, obviously not the way that it is back home. But what weirds me out the most is that, despite all these faeries running around through the wyldwood and everything, the thing that's probably freaked me out the most is, well, you."

Slowly, Puck lifted himself off the bed. His voice shook a little at the edges and was a little breathy at first, but after a few words he hid it admirably. A Puck, after all, never gets caught.

"Woah. I know I'm one-of-a-kind, princess, but you have a way of putting it rather bluntly." His characteristic joking manner had resurfaced. "If I'm the strangest thing you see as we go through Faery, then I will consider you the luckiest person alive and make you a cake full of kittens. Believe me," he made his way away from the couch, over to his own pile of blankets, "I am sure I won't hold the title of Strangest Thing in Faery for long."

"Wait, Robbie!"

Meghan inwardly cursed herself. She was never going to get used to this. Puck, Robbie, everything was all mixed up.

"What?" His grin was the same, she noticed. Even when he was dressed like something out of a Renaissance fair or one of the fantasy animes that they used to watch together, that grin was still just the right bit crooked, just inviting enough to make her ask:

"Can I still call you Robbie?"

Puck rolled his eyes dramatically. "Are we still having this discussion? Yes, princess, yes. You may call me anything your heart desires. Puck, Robbie, Robin, whatever. Wha-at?" He held onto the vowel extra-long, pretending to be annoyed and yawning widely. "Something still bothering you? Come on, some of us actually need our sleep."

"Earlier. What would have happened if I hadn't chosen truth, but said dare instead?"

A few moments paused. Meghan felt the heat rise in her face as Robbie smiled at her and then shrugged, turning back to his bed. The lamplight danced along the gnarled tree walls as she listened to the sounds of blankets shifting and Puck making himself comfortable. She heard him let out a sigh and then laugh softly.

"Maybe someday, princess, you'll choose it and find out."

-o-

A Puck never reveals all his tricks.

The moss squelches under his boots a little bit as he makes his way through the wyldwood in the dark. When he woke up a few minutes ago, he thought that he'd heard tapping at the window and had remembered that he'd forgotten to both check with Twiggs about his home's precautions as well as warn Meghan about the night-time side of Faery. He supposes, as he gently picks his way through the underbrush, that it's not all that different from the day-time side, except that all the dangerous things that come after you in the day just try a little bit harder when the lights are off.

Puck swallows, then holds very still.

Somewhere, someone is crashing through the forest. Someone is desperate. And desperate in Faery usually means dead.

Meghan's bed was empty when he checked it. That was incentive enough to begin this wild chase. He knows that he should have told her something more, should have given her the full run-down on all the creatures that go bump in the night around here, but he also knows that she's scared. She's even scared of him and he can't, won't blame her. He knows that she has made a leap into unfamiliar territory on familial gusto and sheer bravado alone. And, okay, maybe by asking her to see him as he really was he guilted her into it.

In the distance to his left, there's a splash, the sound of arms slapping water, and a voice crying for help.

At once, Robin Goodfellow is a blur.

Moss slides by him like he's slipping on sponges, the scent of rotting, wet wood hangs heavily in the air, and even as his lungs breathe in the dark glamour of the forest he can taste danger spiking the atmosphere like a cruel salt.

The surface of the lake glows like a glass with luminescent smoke curling in tendrils underneath it. Meghan's wet form shatters the top layer, her arms and legs kicking out, struggling to get back to shore, shocked with cold, like her limbs aren't comprehending the orders that her brain is sending about swimming. But that's the Nevernever for you.

One mistake, and you're gone.

He dives into the water in a rush of cold and adrenaline, a part of him surprised that there isn't some kind of steam- he's on fire and freezing with her at the same time- and then he notices the horse's head eerily bobbing towards them, its lips slightly parted.

That it doesn't have pupils is its most striking feature, followed by the sickly color of its skin, a pale white, almost green tint, and the seaweed-like tangles of hair that make up its mane. It is calm but persistent, as though some unseen current of the lake is bringing it towards them, like a fallen log or branch, something mundane and harmless.

It is anything but that.

His frozen arms strike the water like a drum, pushing them forward. He shoves Meghan towards the shore, but either her fingers are too cold to grasp it and pull herself out of the water or she's bewitched by the serene, haunted stare of the horse's head, because she doesn't make a motion to get out until Puck forces her upward, propels her body out of the lake and she has to use her arms to catch herself before she falls onto land.

Her breath comes out in shudders and triple-gasps as the horse's head looms still nearer, as Puck pulls himself out of the water just before the horse gives a wailing neigh, opens its mouth wide with surprising speed, and chomps its rotted, moss-caked teeth down on the spot where Puck's head used to be.

Both of them stare as the still surface of the water reforms, the smoke again begins to curl under the glass, now undisturbed and perfect, as the horse retreats back under the water, glaring at them balefully until it is no more. Its eyes, white and piercing, are the last to fade. The night air cuts into them and both girl and faery are reminded of how very silent the wyldwood can be.

Meghan takes a deep breath. "Puck, Robbie, I-"

"Not now, princess." His eyes are dark and dangerous, a side that he's tried hard not to show her but that still comes out. Meghan is silent.

He walks her back to Twiggs' tree again, one arm around her, guiding her back. It's only when he's toweling off her hair inside that he starts talking to her about it, asking her convivially how she liked meeting her first kelpie, and then the story comes out. Meghan shivers under a mountain of squirrel and chipmunk furs, her eyes wild and hooded, suspicious at each creak of the tree. There was a light outside her window and Ethan was there, or at least something that looked and sounded a lot like Ethan. Puck resists the urge to make a snide remark, because a part of him understands. Redcaps get to people, especially people under duress, and Meghan is no exception. She's still human, after all, and she still trembles, even after he and Twiggs have convinced her to change into a pair of dry, old clothes leftover from one of Twiggs' grandchildren.

But no one can stay up all night, even in the wyldwood, when night is sometimes very variable. Eventually, Twiggs goes back upstairs to the further recesses of his tree nook to his chambers and the candles glimmering along the treetrunk's walls are extinguished.

Puck makes to get up to return to his own, slightly diminished pile of furs, when a hand on his arm stops him.

Meghan is calmer now; her eyes have lost their edge. But still, she's shaking.

"Stay." She whispers, her hold tightening. Her voice is calmer, more like herself, but her grip is not.

Faery will do that to you. It will take everything that you hold dear and rip it from you, make your most treasured, wondrous memories seem dull and dusty in comparison. Humans and faeries, as he has known all along, are not two things that mix well.

Puck smooths out a patch of fur next to her. Meghan is wrapped in blankets like a giant caterpillar, as though seven layers of chipmunk fur will be enough to keep the bad dreams out. They won't be; Puck knows better. She will still dream of water and a disembodied head floating towards her, strangely foreboding and intriguing at the same time, and then she will dream of teeth.

But, he thinks as he nestles into her back, when she does dream of teeth, he will be there, will always be there, with one arm over the mess of furs above her waist and his breath warming the nape of her neck, the coverlets warm from where their bodies press together through the blankets. He knows that she will wake up gasping, shivering, but he will be there, maybe a little bleary-eyed and groggy at first, but still there.

It is perhaps the greatest truth of that night, but he will never admit it. Partially because he half-hopes that she knows already and half-dreads it, but partially because he is a Puck and, on principle, whenever they play these games of truth and dare, he always chooses dare.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note<strong>:

Thanks for reading! This chapter was a bit of an experiment: I wanted to try a dialogue-heavy scene coupled with a very descriptive, action-filled scene and see how it turned out. Let me know what you guys think! I love hearing what people like about this, but I also like hearing what you guys think I should do more of or work harder on. I know action's been a little bit lacking, but the next chapter's going to be pretty intense!

Thanks also for the well-wishes. It means a lot.

In the spirit of killing one's darlings (and resuscitating them?) , here is a snippet of this chapter that didn't make it into the final draft, but seemed like a good example of the crackfic that my brain devolves into when writing late at night:

-o-

Puck rolled his eyes dramatically. "Are we still having this discussion? Yes, princess, yes. You may call me anything your heart desires. Puck, Robbie, Robin, whatever. Though," he paused, as though lost in thought, "I would advise against True Names or lolcat titles in public."

"Lolcats?" Meghan raised an eyebrow. "Am I seriously having a conversation with the same Puck that tricked people in A Midsummer Night's Dream about lolcats? I'm not sure if I can believe faeries know about that stuff."

Puck gave an overly dramatic bow. "Believe whatever you like, princess. But ask yourself this: who do you think placed the very first pancake on a bunny?"

Meghan swatted at him with her pillow, laughing. "So are you Ceiling Puck or Basement Puck?

"Seelie Puck, technically."

It wasn't until Puck was again making his way to his pile of furs that she remembered what she wanted to ask him.

-o-

So there you are: a zombie darling. Thanks again for reading this silliness and I hope this is a good example of why editing is your friend. Ceiling Puck versus Basement Ash is not a story that this fic (or author) could ever hope to do justice to.

-cy.


	8. The Rogue's Ball

**Author's Note**:

Merry Christmas! Consider this chapter my gift to you guys, whatever holiday you celebrate this month.

-cy.

* * *

><p>Everyone was at a crossroads of some kind. And at Arcadia, the palace of crossing paths and crossed loyalties (let alone monarchs), all roads met at its dangerous intersection.<p>

The palace of the Summer Fey was in rare form tonight. While parties and over-the-top celebrations tended to be something of a regular occurrence, it was this time of the year that everyone really went all out. Elysium was an opportunity to show off to visiting rivals, after all, and it tended to inspire some degree of competitive spirit even in the long slog of immortality.

The Hedge was hung with garlands, and every archway was enshrined with greenery and ribbons made of spun spidersilk and woven leaves. Across the ballroom floor, servants were already hurrying trays of delicacies into position and primping tablecloths and finely sculpted centerpieces on the tree-formed slabs that made their tables. To a casual observer, Arcadia would be getting ready for a grand feast. To an insider, though, as Puck was, it was just another skirmish between nations, another attempt by one court to wrest control, favor, opinion to their side.

It was amazing how long he'd been away from this and hadn't missed it one bit.

Humans, though less cunning, were just that: less devious, less caught up in rituals where both sides walked the edge of a knife for the sake of tradition and self-aggrandizement. Humans liked a little change.

And Robin Goodfellow was beginning to wonder whether he was so very different in that regard.

But, it wasn't his night to be making any moves on that count, let alone any moves at all. Puck made himself comfortable on the armrest of Oberon's throne, his raven wings tucked sullenly close, avoiding the bars of his cage carefully. Though not iron, they were still strongly enchanted with enough Summer magic to make even him delirious if he got too close.

The Erlking was doing everything that he could to make sure that his right-hand man and chief jester did not enjoy his imprisonment. Although Puck had to admit, not many people in Arcadia were enjoying much of anything since he and Meghan had gotten back. Least of all, a certain Summer Queen, who seemed to take particular umbrage at it.

"Husband," Titania said with deadly composure, resplendent in her golden-green gown as she lounged in the throne adjacent to Oberon's. "Though we must suffer Lady Mab and her court," she said this last word with a sneer, "I am pleased at least that the half-breed will not be in attendance."

Though lithe and slim as a shoot of grass, Oberon still had an unmistakable aura of power around him. His hand stopped tapping the armrest near Puck's cage as he watched the preparations, and a sudden frisson of stillness shook the air. Even the motion of him arching a brow seemed to send small waves, disturbances of power through the air, as though he were a giant walking amongst ants. When he did speak, it was with the same heaviness and candor that Titania had, but with a sting at the tail, the threat that she had tried to make but that only he could deliver:

"While I am glad to have given you pleasure," he paused, perhaps for irony or for emphasis, "I would remind you that my affairs are just that: mine. Take care, wife, it would do you well not to involve yourself in them."

Titania's lips were pressed white with fury but she made no reply. Rolling his too-green eyes, a gesture comical even for a bird, Puck scratched at the floor of his cage. No, no one was going to have a good time at this party. It would be the same old routine: angry kings and queens, dirty looks and tricks from both courts, fights, dancing, someone getting out of hand and getting turned into an animal. All in a night's work.

You'd think that with all this conflict, something interesting would happen.

-o-

His heart beat like a wardrum, an anapest trapped in a horse's chest. His breath came fast and then faster, even though his lungs were strong enough to handle it, his back strong enough to bear the weight of the girl who clung to him desperately, he knew the truth of their situation even before the first of the ice arrows whizzed dangerously close to Meghan's head.

They would not be able to outrun them, even though he'd swallowed his desire to impress Meghan as a human (or at least as human as he could be) and changed into a horse. With his load, there was no way he was fast enough to escape a wild hunt. Especially not one led by Ash.

He wanted to tell her something, anything really, that would make her understand that he didn't think of her as unimportant, as just another piece of luggage that he transported from place to place at the beck and call of Oberon. There had been others like that- it was Faery, what could anyone expect? - but she was not one of them.

He, well...he liked her.

It was really too bad that ice boy had to come along and ruin things when they were getting interesting.

Meghan gasped and clung tighter as a barrage shuddered into the trees they passed, sending ice creeping through the trunks like arms reaching out, trying to grab at them. "Robbie, you've got to go faster!"

Of course he did, the horse bit at the air, panting. Everyone was always telling him that he had to be quick, act fast. And he was. No one was faster than Robin Goodfellow. Except maybe an Unseelie prince with a grudge and his pack of snow dogs.

Ash's hounds bayed and leapt at him from the dark spaces between the trees, their mouths wide and hungry, eager to be the one to bring down the horse and its rider for their master. Puck cursed them, reminded himself to save up something particularly nasty for His Royal Frostiness later. Just when you think that things can't get any worse, you could always count on Ash to make you truly appreciate kelpies.

Puck snorted and raced faster, ears keenly aware that the hounds were gaining, that there was another horse behind them being urged steadily closer and closer, a horse that carried a deadly rider...

Meghan kept calling out to him, either asking him to go faster or yelling at him to avoid arrows a little better. Strange though it seemed, she didn't seem as afraid. Maybe this was more the kind of danger that she was expecting. Real, swords-and-arrows, in-your-face danger, not the latent horse-in-water variety. Maybe it was easier for her to cope.

That was why he hoped that she could do that, cope, could maybe understand that he had his reasons when he suddenly pulled to a stop, sending her careening into the wyldwood with her built-up momentum hurling her far away from the chase. He didn't like taking chances with her, never had.

The dogs nipped at his legs, but a powerful kick sent them scrambling just long enough for Puck to begin the chase anew, in a different direction than the one he'd jettisoned Meghan in.

His lungs felt like he'd swallowed fire and that the embers of his meal were wending their way through his body, setting every tendon ablaze. His muscles ached, but he raced on, deeper and deeper into the forest, ice whizzing past him with each gallop.

Sure, Meghan's chances in the wyldwood were slim. But if he wasn't even sure if he could outrun this, her chances with him would have been nonexistent.

And Robin Goodfellow always played the odds.

-o-

"You can't be serious."

Puck wore his trademark lopsided grin and had his hands spaded in his pockets, looking every bit like the reliable best friend and wing man to royalty. His stance was easy, and for someone who had just been chased out of the wyldwood, escaped wheezingly into Summer territory, and then been frog-marched by a trio of Oberon's lackeys to this deserted hallway via Arcadia's Hedge, he was looking infuriatingly confident.

In truth, he was pretty nervous. 'Fell and wrath' meant serious business when crossed. And boy, if there was ever an in-between place between obeying and disobeying, he was in it.

But one of the best (and okay, maybe worst) parts of being him was that he could never let things like that show.

Oberon's gaze narrowed and Puck felt the warning prickle of lightning on his skin. "Do not insult me, Goodfellow. I have requested of you small tasks, and lately each one you have failed to perform. I am beginning to think that your time in the human world has affected you too much."

Puck felt this was categorically unfair. "Actually, your highness, I guarded her for, oh, what was it? Sixteen years!" The smile was fled, now the darker, feral side was rearing its head, leering at his king. "I have done everything you asked to keep her safe. Under my watch, she has been able to lead a mostly normal life, without interference. Now, since you told me I was relieved of my duties, I find she has been made to work in the kitchens and earlier, thanks to your paragon hostess of a wife, turned into a deer."

He let the words and implication linger, a slight growl curling the penultimate 'r'.

The air between the jester and the king was deathly still, as though every bit of movement had been sucked out of it in the tension between the two sides. Both were caught between choices, and Puck knew that the king had yet to decide just how important Meghan Chase was to him. Given what he knew about Oberon, this could take time. And time was something that they didn't have.

"Look," Puck began again, wary, calmer now, "I know you need to think and I know it's a surprise. But she's here now, and you're the only one who can protect her. If you don't do something, she will not last long."

Oberon considered him the same way he considered the humans lost in rapture to the dances led by his courtiers: cool, with a detached blend of condescension and disgust. "You have been a worthy guardian, Robin Goodfellow. But while your advice is sound and is given as though to a friend," Puck felt his hopes droop as Oberon's eyes flashed, "you must remember who is lord here, who the liege and who the servant. Orders are meant to be obeyed; all fey know this. Your time in the mortal realm has done you no credit. It is perhaps for the best that you take time to remember who it is you are."

Puck swallowed, mind working furiously to circumvent what he knew would come. "You don't understand-"

But Oberon's magic reached him before he could complete the sentence. Puck felt it rip through him, twisting his own magic against his will no matter how hard he fought against it.

"No." Oberon's voice shook the branches of the hallway and a few leaves trembled to the stone floor. "I do not think that _you_ understand." He held out his arm and the raven that stood in the place of Puck flew onto his shoulder as though summoned by an invisible pull. "There is a difference between human and fey, Goodfellow. It is time you remembered it."

-o-

Meghan Chase was no expert at goblin evasion, but having escaped that particular brush with the wilder aspects of Faery without (much) harm, she seemed bolder for the experience. She was still soaked, dirty, and exhausted from the near-constant march that the cait sith had enforced upon her, but the promise of getting closer to Ethan and to finding out answers at last kept her moving forward despite fatigue.

Even still, her pace wasn't fast enough for a certain member of her party.

"Come along, human. This tardiness is enough to almost make me feel sorry for your Puck."

Meghan sighed, huffing and puffing along as best she could. It had been a long walk for anyone, especially someone who had been accosted and almost eaten by a team of goblins. But she needed something else to focus on other than that memory. Ethan, maybe. Or...

"Grim, why do you keep calling him 'my' Puck? Isn't there only one of him?"

Grimalkin turned his head back to look at her with an expression of supreme feline frustration. "You are, once again, unfortunately dim." He shook his head as he continued to keep a brisk pace well ahead of Meghan. "You have somehow survived where many of your kind have perished, yet you fail to see the simplest things dancing in front of you. I suppose I must chalk it up to the inexcusable stupidity of humans."

Meghan had her mouth open, ready to take issue with that, when the grand gates of Arcadia sprang into view and took her breath away.

-o-

Sometimes, the raven would visit just before she woke up.

Oberon's magic was the magic of Summer and of daylight; in the nighttime it was weakest and while it did not weaken enough to break or falter, if one knew the right way to wriggle, it could be made a little more pliable.

The kitchen of Sarah Skinflayer was a mess of fluid and meat-most of it belonging to the food, some not- and each dish seemed to leave some token of its passage on the stained, grease-dotted floor. When the raven looked down to get his bearings, sometimes he could see the shape of his bird-body reflected back up at him from the oil on the stone tiles. Gingerly lifting his parcel of bread and a few slices of cheese- not so much a difficult but unwieldy load- he fluttered towards the pantry, where a girl with blond hair had wrapped herself in bags of crushed grains to sleep.

Sometimes, the raven would set down his wrapped package of food and watch the girl, as though expecting her to wake up. For a few minutes, both of them were alike, stuck in-between where they were and where they needed to be. But she never woke up when he was there, not before daylight returned and the bird was long gone, back to a lonely cage on a lonelier throne.

-o-

It should not have come as a surprise, Puck rationalized, as the dance wore on. Weird things always happened at crossroads, and nights like this couldn't help but be a little interesting.

This was why they said to be careful what you wished for.

Still, who would have thought that the half-blood daughter of the Summer King and the third Prince of Winter would be dancing together like this? Even the moss on the dance floor seemed to carry them on lightened steps, as though the whole room were spinning with them as its delirious center.

Ash of the Unseelie Court, the same Ash (Puck wanted to remind her) who had chased them through the wyldwood, attacked them both with arrows and dogs, and who was generally a pretty dangerous guy to be around, was dancing with the girl Puck had been assigned to protect for a little under twenty years. And, to make matters worse, the only reason why it was not him dancing with her was because the Lord of the Summer Fey had complained that _he_, Robin Goodfellow of all people, was acting a little too human.

Black wings beat at the cage, but it did him no good. It wasn't fair. The raven certainly didn't see Oberon or Mab chastising the prince errant about how human he was or wasn't getting with the princess.

But that was the difference, the bird watched sourly as the pair spun across the floor, Ash looking graceful and predatory, Meghan holding her own in the dance and looking unsure but elegant. They were royalty, and that changed everything.

All those years of protecting her, watching out for her, making sure that her dumb classmates and her well-meaning but forgetful family didn't hurt her, everything that he had done seemed like it had no weight, no ounce of matter in comparison. He had, after all, been acting on orders. If he hadn't been, well, he would have ended up in this cage a lot earlier. Royalty could circumvent all that, could do anything. They could be knights, dance with princesses, command their underlings without the bat of an eyelash.

Puck wished he had a mouth that could scowl. As jester, he took great pleasure in undermining those with power; it was what all the stories told about him said, he was the character who those same underlings could relate to, the servant who outwitted his lord and made his royal lieges act the role of fool instead.

Oh, he would show Oberon how very fey he still was. Faeries had a cruel sense of humor and Puck intended to employ his for a grand prank indeed.

But still, as he watched her in that dress, every hollow bird bone in him quaking when her eyes widened when she looked his way, he couldn't help feeling like the one who had been tricked tonight was him.


	9. The Rogue's Spell

Puck picked at the seam of one of his shirtsleeves thoughtfully, brushing the few remaining feathers off his clothing in as slow a manner as possible.

He knew that it was infuriating Oberon, knew that half the Seelie Court was milling about him in varied states of distress and that the other half was staring at him with glares of disbelief and begrudging admiration for being so flippant with their king. After all, the Summer princess had just flown the coop, and the Erlking had gotten so desperate to get her back that he was willing to free another bird for that purpose.

The only one who seemed pleased with him right now, ironically, was Titania.

"Husband, please." The Queen of Summer purred, still dressed in her Elysium finery and looking every bit the composed and regal mistress of Arcadia. "The half-breed is gone to us and will trouble us no more. Let your enemies think that they have a valuable pawn and then when they make their move to negotiate for the whelp, we can strike freely."

Her smile was all strawberries and vanilla, promises of forgiveness and easy peace over an ugly core.

Puck knew it well enough not to be taken in and he suspected that, somewhere in there Oberon knew it, too.

"You will find the girl." Oberon repeated solemnly, ignoring that his wife had spoken. Titania, of course, looked furious at this, but chose to bide her time. In Puck's experience, that generally meant that something worse was on the way. Oh dear.

"Well, not to put a damper on anyone's plans," Puck continued brushing raven feathers off his clothes, even making a show of checking his back for them to get a few laughs from his audience, "but as a reminder, I haven't agreed to anything yet."

The Erlking's impassive mouth thinned into a small line. It was a little gesture, a twitch in the monarch's face, and unless you were looking for it, you would never have noticed it.

Puck, though, had experience in these matters.

"I have been held against my will." He continued dramatically, hands held innocently in the air for the court to see. "I have been caged, even! And now my lord Oberon comes to me asking for favors."

He let his voice drop and the room fell silent. No one was asked of favors by their king. There were orders, only orders, not bargains, not favors, no please's and thank you's. That was humanity talking. Puck was walking a dangerous path, and even though the room hummed with an excited energy from the sidhe around them, Puck could tell by Titania's carnivorous smile that he had erred in his choice of words.

Maybe Oberon hadn't been all that far from the mark when he'd commented on how much his jester had changed.

And sure enough, lightning cut through the sky and a rumble of thunder shook the floor around them, nearly catching Puck off balance.

"Servant," Oberon intoned, and in that moment, no one could question that he was the Lord of the Court here. Power radiated off him in electric waves and if the crowd had not already ceased their scrambling and chatter, they would have been silent now. "You do not demand favors of your liege, much less insinuate that you should be granted them after your failures. You will find Meghan Chase and bring her back without harm, without delay."

Puck's expression flickered, a flash of anger biting through the jester's mask before he wore his easy smile again. Royalty were always this way.

But Puck had dealt with royalty for a long, long time.

He moved his hand over his mouth, his index finger tapping his mocking lips as though deep in thought. After a few moments passed when he felt like significant consideration had been done, Puck swept into an elaborate bow.

"Very well, my lord. It shall be as you wish and more." He grinned, then turned and made for the door.

"You seem in high spirits, Goodfellow, for one who has been chastened by his king." Titania, of course. The Summer Queen might recognize that it was useless to stop Oberon's pursuit of Meghan, but she couldn't resist taking a parting shot at the king's prime lackey before he left. She just loved rubbing the difference in power between her and everyone else in. All royalty did.

And that was exactly what Puck had counted on.

"Of course," he tipped an imaginary hat at her, glancing back over his shoulder at the unhappy pair of rulers and their silent entourage, "I have my freedom, after all."

Which was more than he could say for just about everyone else in that court.

-o-

Blue Chaos brimmed like a lost Babylon, full of humans and faeries alike in their midnight finery, ducking and gyrating to the heavy bass beat that thumped through the floors. Drinks sparkled through glass in the hands of dancers, winking icily at her from the dance floor, each glimmer, each sway of someone's hips an invitation to join them, to lose herself...

Meghan Chase swallowed hard and looked away.

It was just glamour. Really, just glamour. She closed her eyes, trying to get her bearings. Ever since finding out that Oberon was her father and that she could control a little bit of faery magic, she'd been able to see more clearly through it, and she knew that now, if she looked back to the crowd, she'd see the club-goers as who they really were, satyrs and phoukas and everything else, not their human guises. But she was still human, at least partly, and in that first moment of entering a place like this she still got caught up in it, still felt drawn, as the other humans in the hot mess of bodies were, to the attraction and the thrill of danger that awaited her if she chose to venture further in and let herself go.

She bit down hard on her lip.

"Humans." Grimalkin rolled his eyes. "Even though you are half-fey you still possess all their failings. It's hardly believable for Oberon's bairn, but still very unfortunate."

Meghan frowned. Alright, fine. So maybe her feelings were due to the effects of the glamour. She'd never had a boyfriend, gone on a date, and her last brush with an attractive member of the opposite gender had ended with her being photoshopped into an embarrassing, half-naked pose and crying her eyes out in the nurse's office. But something had still drawn her gaze back to the heaving press of dancers. Something that was curious. Something, she realized, that was intrigued and maybe a little... jealous?

_Glamour, Meg_. She reminded herself. But a deeper part of her wondered if maybe it wasn't.

She'd never have come to a place like this, not on her own. But now that she was there, Meghan wondered if maybe there wasn't a hidden draw in it after all, this place that had seemed so forbidden, so out of reach until now. There were kids as young as she was out there, grabbing partners whose names Meghan would bet they didn't even know, caught in mad embraces with faeries who grinned like sharks sighting dinner. A disturbing thought hit her, that there was really no difference between them and her at all, except that she knew that was going on and they didn't.

And then a more disturbing thought struck her, occupied her, until the cait sith spoke and Meghan jumped.

"Innocence shattered." Grimalkin commented wryly from his perch her shoulder. "Yes, human, it is fascinating. But really, must we? Come, let's find the trod and be done with it. I'm not anxious to spend any more time here than necessary."

Meghan nodded, tearing her eyes away from the scene and forcing herself to focus on Grimalkin's directions as they approached the bar. It must have been the glamour talking. Yeah, that was it. The Meghan that had gone to school, had played video games with her best friend, had taken care of her little brother, and been a dutiful daughter would not think such thoughts.

But then again, a lot of things had changed. Robbie wasn't Robbie, Ethan was kidnapped, her mother had had an affair with a faery king...

Meghan shivered and hesitated before touching her ears, not sure if she wanted to know if they were still pointed.

Just how much of the old Meghan was she? How much human in her was left? What was the real her and what wasn't?

She took a deep breath and followed the cat.

-o-

"Some questions are better off not being answered." Shard grinned, her teeth gleaming like deadly icicles. "Like: how painfully will you die and for how long? I don't believe I owe you the courtesy of elaborating, my Summer whelp. But you better believe me when I say I will enjoy every moment of it."

The troll off to her side roared, its iron shackles searing into its flesh as it shifted position.

"Grumly!" Shard raised her hand, her eyes dark and desolate as coal in winter. "Kill."

But before the troll and the gathered redcaps could make a move, a bird as fast as shadow zipped into the room and exploded in a swirl of feathers between Meghan and her attackers.

"Yup, still got it." Puck smiled roguishly. "Oh, I do love a grand entrance. Miss me, princess?"

"Robbie!" Meghan cried. Something was different about him, she thought. She was on the verge of saying more, but he just offered her a wink and then leapt off into battle without giving her the chance.

Maybe calling him Robbie had been wrong. Robbie had been the boy who had helped her on her school projects, gotten popcorn tangled in her hair when they watched movies together. This boy, with his infectious smile and just as pervasive laugh, seemed almost a completely different person, a look-alike with a darker history than the boy she knew.

"Puck." She breathed. Grimalkin snorted.

"Please, human, if you'd like to lose your head, by all means stand there and admire Goodfellow's work. I, for one, intend on keeping mine." And with that, the cat disappeared, just as a redcap launched itself at Meghan's face.

"Oops, sorry, princess." Puck appeared out of nowhere and deflected the attack, still smiling, his clothes slightly torn, but other than than and a sheen of sweat glittering on his skin, looking no worse for wear (and maybe, Meghan was shocked to admit, a little better). "Looks like pest control missed one."

He punted the redcap at the fuming winter sidhe, then bounded back off into the fray with a whoop, dodging between the troll's stomping legs. Illusion and glamour swirled around him, only staying in one place long enough for one of the redcaps to come at him and then winking out of sight as Grumly's foot came down hard on his pursuer.

"Never gets old! Shard, it's been a while, huh?" Puck called in between dodges and roars of the furious troll. "I was wondering when I might get to pay your fine establishment another visit."

"I'll have your head mounted on my wall, Goodfellow!" The winter faery growled, aiming her spear at him. "You can pay all the visits you like when you're dead."

"Tsk, some people have no sense of humor." Puck whispered into Meghan's ear for a moment, and then was gone again, dancing around troll legs and redcaps like the leader of his own mad parade.

But his appearance had been enough. Shard had seen the way that he had doted on the girl, protected her, and coupled with her own rage at being tricked into opening the trod, Meghan was a perfect target. She took deadly aim at the girl with her spear and was just about to let fly when she stopped and started batting at something behind her with roars of frustration.

Meghan watched, shocked, as Grimalkin winked in and out of sight on Shard's back. She glanced to Puck, who was still throwing jibes at the redcaps as much as before, but she noticed that he had taken some hits and another wave of redcaps was preparing to join the charge. This couldn't continue and she knew it.

So when she called out to the troll, she really wasn't expecting her plan to work.

-o-

"'Luck." Puck stuck his tongue out at Shard as she held her spear up between the advancing troll that had decided to turn on its master. "I have a feeling I'll see your head on that wall sooner than mine, Shard." He muttered, closing the door.

The trod was a glittering tunnel of snow and silver rock. Though it was illuminated by torches along the walls, the corridor seemed to have its own brand of coldness and wildness about it, as though it and its light offered minimal protection against the beings that waited from them at the end of it. Puck saw Meghan shiver and he glamoured her a snug, white jacket.

"Sorry, princess." He said as he gave it to her. "I would have offered you mine, but," he tugged at the collar and winced, "I think these clothes are just about done."

"Goodfellow, you would do us all a favor if you bathed." Grimalkin hissed, ears flattened. "You are giving off a most unflattering stench."

"Hey!" Puck called after the cait sith. "I had to fly here all the way from Arcadia after all. Cut me a break, cat, it's been a rough morning to be me."

"I'd imagine." The cat fixed him with a calculating stare. "I suppose that it was quite the scene."

Puck laughed, rubbing the back of his head where a redcap had struck with its baseball bat. "Ouch. Glad to see you've been doing alright without me, princess, though I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit offended at how well."

Meghan caught him in a hug. "I missed you, you idiot. And why are you offended? I'm still alive."

She didn't say it, but she felt like she had more reason to be upset than he did. After all, she hadn't abandoned him to the wyldwood and then left him to fend for himself in Arcadia. But still, she remembered the bird in the cage on Oberon's throne, and even though she wished that someone had been there for her when she'd been turned into a deer and then made to work in the kitchens of the castle, a part of understood that Puck had been just as much a prisoner as she was.

"Well," Puck shrugged, "after all this, yes, you are still alive, still very capable, making deals with dangerous felines." He cocked an eyebrow at her expression of surprise. "Oh come on, princess, it's not like this one ever does anything for free. Still, pretty soon you'll be so capable that you won't need your Puck at all."

He feigned a morose sigh.

"Oh shut up, Robbie." Meghan stuck her tongue out. "He's just helping us get to Tir Na Nog."

"Tir Na Nog?" Puck's eyes widened. "Why in all the corners of Faery would you want to go there?"

"Ethan." Meghan replied. "He's not at Arcadia, so by process of elimination, he's got to be at the Winter Court. Oh! Thanks for the jacket, Robbie! It helps a lot."

And then she turned back to the corridor, as though expecting him to just follow.

"Oh my." Grimalkin cocked his eyebrow. "It seems one of us had an ulterior purpose."

Wincing a bit, Puck sighed and made a swat at the feline. "I was going to get to that after we'd said _hello_."

"What?" Meghan turned back, confusion spreading on her face.

"Strictly speaking, princess, I'm under orders to bring you back to the Summer Court. I know it kinda puts a damper on things, after our stirring battle with Shard and all, but..."

She transfixed him with a look, her lips quirking up in a smile that was so similar to his own that he figured she must have copied it, learnt it by mimicry. "You wouldn't. You want me to find Ethan as much as I do."

"Orders are orders, princess." Puck frowned, shrugging. "I might be Oberon's favorite chew toy, but just because I make him laugh when I squeak doesn't mean that I can stand up to him canine to canine, if you get my drift. He is one powerful faery and while I am no small menace, I'm no match for him."

Meghan's mouth worked in several strange directions, as though this would help it to better understand. "No, Puck, Robbie," she ran through the litany of names, hoping that one of them would elicit some sympathy, "you can't do this. Not when I still have to find Ethan. I won't go with you."

"I knew this would go over poorly. But you know," Puck drew close, whispering and taking a stand of her hair between his fingers, "I could always cast a charm spell on you. You're very stubborn, but I am an old, old faery, Meghan Chase. And I could make myself very hard to resist."

They were silent, eyes locked on the other, Puck's green eyes dancing with mirth and a hidden darkness, Meghan's blue eyes flickering with determination. For a moment, she wondered what it might be like to have a charm spell cast on her. Would she end up as in thrall to Puck as the humans in Blue Chaos were to their faery dates? An image of herself, languorously draping her limbs over Puck's neck, waist, dashed through her mind and she blinked quickly, as though hoping to dispel it, but it lingered. Her cheeks burned. Could he really do that to her? Would he?

Puck's grin said nothing either way, but Meghan wondered. How human was Puck after all?

Her lips parted, her breathing quickened. And more pressing, how badly did she want to find out?

"I am getting tired of waiting and going nowhere." A very bored Grimalkin sighed, sweeping his tail along the cold floor irritably. "You are not going to cast any charms on her, Goodfellow, and you know it. Now that that has been settled, may we at last move along?"

Rolling his eyes, Puck let out a small cry of exasperation. "Cat! I can't believe you. Ruining all my fun. Well, fine, it's not like I was going to." He stuffed his hands into his pockets with a sigh and a fake pout. "But, seriously, your father is not going to be pleased with me, princess. I've had a lot of second chances lately and I think I am just about out of luck with him."

He bit his lip, something (resignation?) passing over his features for a moment before it was replaced with his trademark grin. "Still, how often does an opportunity to cause a little havoc between courts like this pop up?"

"Fool." Grimalkin rolled his eyes and walked ahead.

Puck laughed. "I think I prefer jester, but, yes, that too."

"Banishment is no small punishment." The cat lowered his voice.

"Yeah, well," Puck grimaced, "I've got a few tricks left up my sleeve. Don't tell Meghan."

"That might require a small favor."

"Tsh, cats."

Meghan walked with them, wandering behind a little bit from time to time as Puck talked about Arcadia's distress first to her and then to Grimalkin, when he noticed that Meghan had stopped listening. She kept up, though, all the while thinking about charm spells and a certain faery, and whether or not it would have been so bad for him to have cast one after all.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note:<strong>

Glad you guys have been enjoying this! I'm pretty pleased with how it's been going as well- I'm trying to keep more action in here rather than crazy soul-searching all the time, lol. Keep me posted on how I'm doing! I love hearing from you guys.

Happy new years,

-cy.


	10. The Rogue's Rival

"Well, this is a little colder than I'm used to, but I guess it could be nice if you enjoy frostbitten toes and unsightly gangrene." Puck sniffed, pushing open the door to Tir Na Nog from the trod. "How about we begin this adventure, princess?"

But before Meghan could answer, another, darker voice cut in.

"I don't think that you'll get very far."

Standing before them, his black hair tousled by the chill winter wind whipping in through the doorway, was a figure clad in silvery white armor with a sword that shone like ice stretched out before him, the blade wavering with a challenge. He was a dark mark on the pristine landscape, his eyes boring into their group like a spear. If Puck was vibrant colors, bravado, and banter, then this man was his opposite: he was subtlety and silence, a quiet but pervasive threat.

"Ash." Puck said, like he'd bit into a rotten fruit, wincing at the sweetness turned bitter. His hands found Meghan's shoulders and ushered her behind him. "You have this great habit of showing up exactly when no one wants you around."

The prince shrugged, brushing it off. "It tends to come in handy. Shall we, then?"

Puck snorted derisively, his smile becoming more dangerous. "Oh, you better believe it."

Meghan could feel the muscles in Puck's back tense as he reached to his boot and pulled forth a dagger whose blade was clear as glass and had designs swirled into it, etching out the delicate lines of leaf spines. Through the blade, she could see the barren, snow-covered landscape, unmarred by the passage of man or beast.

But not for much longer, she realized. Not if these two had their way.

"Puck," she whispered, her head close to the trickster faery's ear, "you don't have to do this. We can talk. Ash is-"

"Not the kind of guy you want to get too close to, princess." Puck whispered back. "And unless the Nevernever's changed a lot since I left, I don't think having your sword out means you wants to play nice."

She bit her lip, watching as Puck winked, trying to get a smile. But Meghan was sure that she had seen something unspoken pass between them. Ash was more than Puck was making him out to be, that she knew. She and Ash hadn't danced together at Elysium, hadn't felt that connection, strange and treacherous though it had been, for nothing. She refused to believe that it really was as simple as everyone was making it out to be, winter versus summer, good versus evil, locked in a constant battle like every over-used anime plot.

"You always were pretty dumb." Puck grinned manically. "But if it's a fight you want, then I am more than happy to oblige."

He stretched his shoulders, trying to loosen the muscle. It hadn't been all that long since his fight with Shard, and while redcaps were normally easy fare, he'd also been employing a significant amount of concentration in order to evade getting stomped by a troll, not to mention having to fly a while after a long term stay as a raven on Oberon's chair. Ash was an obstacle that generally required all the tricks he had up his sleeve, and that was what had always made their sparring interesting in the past. They'd been well-matched.

These days, though, it just seemed to prolong the inevitable, that, one way or another, one of them was going to slip up and die.

"Kiss for luck, princess?" Puck looked at Meghan hopefully.

It was a shot out of the blue, but hey, a faery could dream. It wasn't like he was going to get all that many opportunities with a cait sith watching over their every move to the ice fortress like a hawk. Puck knew Grimalkin too well to doubt that the cat would allow his query to go off anywhere interesting or do anything gossip-worthy without him. That was just one more reason why he'd been less than thrilled about Meghan bringing the feline along.

"After all, if I die," for once, Puck spoke his thoughts aloud, "when am I going to get another chance?" He smiled winningly.

It was always this way. He always lied a little more, pretended and acted a little more over the top when something this serious was at stake. A true trickster never showed his hand.

Still, Meghan frowned. "I don't want you to die."

"Sad to say, it's all too common in duels to the death." He stuck out his tongue. "That's why I need the luck."

She hugged him, and she realized that since their frenzied ride through the wyldwood when he was a horse, this was the first time that she'd hugged Puck as a human. His body seemed like something long lost, familiar that she hadn't expected to come back, something calm, calling back the memories of the last time they were like this, when he'd saved her from the kelpie and then spent the night by her side.

He was always saving her, she realized, always doing this, standing between her and trouble and often getting himself into even more trouble because of it.

She brushed her lips across his cheek, feeling her breathing go a little odd. "It's like you're my knight in shining armor."

For a moment, she thought that she must have said something wrong, because Puck started, and then his smile turned strangely sad.

"Of all the things, princess, I can never be that." He grinned, this time all traces of sadness gone, replaced with fierce determination. "Faeries and iron don't mix well, remember? Let's just tackle one problem at a time, ice boy for instance."

As she watched them circle each other, she couldn't shake the feeling that she'd touched a sore nerve, that maybe this altercation went a lot deeper than a feud between courts.

"Everyone has some personal baggage." Grimalkin groomed his tail as Puck and Ash took up sparring positions. "These two more than most, but it can't be helped."

And then the battle was joined.

Meghan could hardly follow the blur of sword and dagger as Puck and Ash parried and dodged. A crisp mountain breeze cut through the fight like a harbinger of a storm, setting Meghan's teeth chattering but not slowing the combatants in the least. While she couldn't track all of their moves, she could see their strategies. Ash's tactics were quick, decisive offense. He favored close combat, drawing in his opponent with bombardments of icicles until he could lure Puck into a swordfight, where Meghan surmised, his true strength lay.

Puck, on the other hand, seemed to prefer keeping the battle as far away from him as possible. He fought defensively, either through hurling small balls of fur at Ash, which turned into animals and fought in his place, or through cunning manipulation tricks that saw several Puck doppelgangers all leering down at a surrounded Ash.

She thought that she could almost make some sense of it, their delirious dance, but then, just as Puck and Ash were drawing closer, beginning their steps in the hand to hand combat part that she knew would signal the fight's end, something swept underneath her like a wave. At first she thought that it was Summer magic when she felt the electricity cut through her, but then when the metal claws and limbs lifted her in a buzzing tide, and she knew she wasn't dealing with normal faeries anymore.

"Puck, help!" She cried out as the strange creatures, the same gremlins that had invaded the computer lab at her school and then sent her that haunting message in the kitchens of Arcadia swarmed her en masse, flowing out below her like a blanket of water, and then bore her upwards like she were some sort of rock star being carried away by her legions of adoring fans.

Only this time, from her experiences in the Nevernever, she was pretty sure that her "fans" were less the autograph-and-picture variety and more the razor-sharp-claws-and-hostage kind.

"Help me!" She tried to call out again, but this time, the gremlins rushed over her as they tumbled away, a wave of metal cutting across the clean, white hills, and she could speak or see no more.

-o-

"Well." Puck stuck his hands on his hips, his glass dagger still grasped in one fist. "This makes things a little awkward."

His nose was burning from the ozone-spiked vapor trail that the gremlins had left in their wake. Throw in the fact that the patch of land that they'd traveled over was blackened as though it had been razed by a small army, and you got one very nasty (and very lethal) enemy to chase after.

"Goodfellow." His opponent still had his sword at the ready, was ready and willing to continue where they had left off. But Puck just sighed, frowning at the dark path cut into the snow. The Winter prince was unrelenting, his expression cold. "Will you run from accepting responsibility for Ariella's death yet again? That's a new low, even for you."

Puck dug his foot into the snow, solidifying his position. "Oh, believe me, pretty boy, we aren't done yet. But I have bigger fish to fry. Specifically, whatever the hell those things were that stole Meghan. Who is currently kidnapped, by the way, in case it escaped your notice."

"As always, you show yourself to be a poor guardian."

"If you two would stop posturing," Grimalkin cut in with a very feline sniff, "I believe their trail leads into a cave."

-o-

"Why do I have the feeling that I'm not going to like what comes next?" Puck muttered, rubbing his cold hands together but keeping his dagger at the ready. They found the place easily enough, and no other creatures seemed willing to go around it, which made sense, considering the harsh smell of sulfur that cut through the air nearby. "This place feels about as fun to explore as a tin can factory."

Ash raised an eyebrow at Puck as he scouted the entrance. Before he gingerly poked his head in, he whispered with a faint smirk. "So it is true, then. The great Robin Goodfellow is acting like a human."

Puck had a witty retort about humanity and where Ash might be inclined to stuff it on the tip of his tongue, but the way that the winter prince's eyes widened as he withdrew silenced it. Instead, Puck groaned, slapping a hand to his forehead melodramatically.

"Great. Don't tell me, it's another dragon."

"It was a wyvern, you ass. Can't you even remember that?" Ash gave him a sour look. "And no, it's not, actually."

"Oh!" Puck brightened. "Well, should be no problem for me to kick it to the ass-end of Faery then, right?"

"It's a fire-breathing horse made out of steel."

Puck was silent. After a while, he sighed with a little laugh. "Damn. Well... damn. This is what I get for volunteering to be the decoy."

-o-

Sometimes, he did dumb things.

"Dumb" was usually getting tipsy in the company of phoukas or hesitating a little too long before reporting back to Oberon with news about his daughter. "Dumb" was even an excuse for what he had been doing recently, leading Meghan into enemy territory for the sake of her younger brother. What he was doing right now, though, as he dodged between shots of fire and the clattering stamp of iron hooves, wasn't dumb at all.

It was abject stupidity, brainlessness boarding on suicide, and went so far beyond the realm of actions he would normally bill as dumb that he needed a new name for it.

Ice boy had run out with Meghan when Puck had given them an opening, zinging in with a bevy of twig-and-leaf copies of himself and several furry compatriots. Meghan's captor and then the gremlins had roared with rage and as the battle was joined, their strange Iron glamour trickled along his skin and cut into him, a slow poison. But Puck had to hold them back, keep them from following until Ash gave the signal that he and Meghan were clear.

Another copy winced and then vanished as a steel-clad hoof cut through it like ripping paper. The leaf it had been fell charred to the floor.

"INTRUDER! YOU WILL RETURN MEGHAN CHASE TO US OR PERISH!" The horse reared, its hooves burning into the cave walls.

All around the steel horse, the ice cave seemed to be collapsing as its magic unraveled in the maelstrom of fire and falling ice. Even the air in here was becoming more and more polluted with the scent of iron; it was like Puck was riding in a smaller version of the school bus, the very air was spiked with it. Metallics cut into him from all angles; even as a raven, when he flew to evade his pursuers, he knew that he would not be able to last long, not if the spurts of fire kept coming at him like this, the iron piercing his skin so easily. As Summer fey, fire was like a second skin coiling along his nerves, but this kind was different.

These flames seethed like curses, biting into him, unwilling to let go. Puck knew at once that he could not hope to turn the battle in his favor. At last, maybe he had overreached himself.

But hey, he gasped as another burst of smoke clogged the air and his horse opponent loomed over him, at least he wouldn't have to put up with the humiliation for long.

-o-

"Puck!" Meghan cried into the flames rounding out of the cave. There was no response, save Puck's taunts at Ironhorse and the Iron faery's growing whinnies of frustration and rage. She struggled even as Ash held her, her lips cherry red in her ashen face.

"Come on." Ash implored, tugging at her arm, moving her further and further from the entrance to the cave. "You need to get away from here and fast."

"Puck's still in there!" She protested. "And if you think that I'm leaving my friend, you've got another thing coming-"

"Puck will die." Ash said detachedly, in the same voice that Meghan thought one might describe a particularly boring slug. "Unless you are away from this place, far enough away, he will continue to protect the entrance. So, move _away_."

Meghan scowled at him, her face a mixture of confusion and distress. Her best friend was possibly being roasted alive for her sake and the boy that she (maybe) had a crush on since dancing with him at a faery ball was telling her to abandon her friend. If Puck had been in her position, would he have retreated when she was in danger?

The answer to that seemed to be right in front of her.

"No! Get him out of there, Ash! Do something!"

It burst from her like a bird, like an orchid sprout breaking through rough earth. Ash shot her a strange look even as he stabbed his sword into the ground, making the ice seal that bound Ironhorse (and Puck?) inside the cave. Meghan even surprised herself, her hands finding their way to her mouth as though they were attempting to hide the sound, cover it after the fact. But, her surprises were hardly over yet.

"Appreciated at last," a very weary Puck chuckled, voice warbly. "Well, princess, you've just made my day."

And then he fell over into the snow, black feathers poofing out from him in a wispy cloud.

For a moment, Ash and Meghan just looked at each other. And then the prince of the Unseelie Court took to one knee, clutching his stomach, surprise flickering over his features.

"Copycat." Puck wheezed from the ground. "You weren't fighting it. I was. How do _you_ get injured?"

"Shrapnel. Some piece of iron must have flown at me as I was sealing it off. Gods," Ash hissed through clenched teeth, his blue eyes flecked with pain as he attempted to stand again and failed. "I will be of little use like this."

"Oh dear." Grimalkin raised an eyebrow as he surveyed the fallen. Meanwhile, the cave glittered ominously as Ironhorse attempted to roast his way out. "Are both of you out of commission so soon? I had expected better."

"Never fear, princess!" Puck's hand shot upwards in a triumphant fist, though the rest of him remained in the snow heap, his speech breathy as though he'd run a marathon. "We'll guard you with our very lives."

Ash just glowered at him.

Glancing back at the cave, Grimalkin sighed and buried his head under a paw, ears flattened. "We must keep going. I highly doubt any enchantment will hold up against that creature for long and, though your avowed protectors seem eager for a rematch," sarcasm rolled off his tongue, "I would prefer to be farther along our journey by the time our opponent breaks out."

"Um, Grim?" Meghan stepped forward hesitantly looked from one fallen boy to the other. "Are we going to have to carry them? I'm not sure how far we can make it like this, to be honest."

Puck looked pallid at best as he tried to pull himself up, the effects of the wintry territory clearly taking its toll on top of his injuries. Even Ash, who should have been at home in the frozen tundra, was slow to attempt to rise.

The cat simply rolled his eyes and sighed as though inconvenienced. "I suppose a detour may be in order."

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note<strong>:

So glad you guys are digging this! I know school's going to start again soon (at least for me), so here's a chapter before the academic craze begins anew. Thanks again for all the kind words and encouragement- I really appreciate it. Next chapter will feature a small deviation from canon (!) and summerpods. Excited? I am. ;D

-cy.


	11. The Rogue's Fever

Chillsorrow Manor was a maze of passageways where cold seeped through the petrified trees and frozen stones of the castle walls like a vice, a malignant sentience all in itself, waiting for unfortunate passerby. The little group had arrived to find the place deserted, though it wasn't until Ash and Puck had completed a thorough search of the inside that anyone relaxed. Sometimes Grimalkin would flicker out of existence for minutes at a time, and Meghan (who had been left to the safety of the drawing room) was left with nothing to do but inspect the walls for signs of imminent danger, her breath rising in wisps of hot, smoky air.

But all the disappearances must have had something to do with events happening elsewhere because eventually the cat had serenely said that he would be gone for the remainder of the night and then vanished for good.

"That can't be a good thing." Ash muttered, returning from his inspection of the upstairs rooms just as Puck resurfaced from the basement, cobwebs speckling his red hair.

"You never realize how big basements are from the outside." Puck commented thoughtfully, coming up through a door leading into the cellars. "For instance, I never would have guessed that a family of Winter sidhe would have these," here he held out a bowl with the dust brushed off, "just lingering in their stores, waiting to be eaten."

Meghan glanced into the bowl warily, too many times the victim of one of Robbie's jokes at school to look at anything he held out without some caution. But these things didn't look too bad, not like they could hurt anyone. They just seemed like a combination of pea pods mixed with orange slices, except that they were colored a red-purple and flecked with hints of gold, giving them a rich, juicy tint.

"Summerpod." Ash commented dryly, inspecting the contents of the bowl. "And you mean to eat it?"

"Well, duh, ice boy." Puck rolled his eyes. "It's a delicacy. And, after nearly getting roasted alive by a very angry Iron faery, I think I'm ready for a treat."

"That is stealing, Goodfellow." Ash frowned. "The family may be out, but that doesn't mean we should raid their larder. We are using their house, yes, but remember, they are still under the protection of the Unseelie Court."

"Oooh, the big, scary Unseelie Court. Live a little, prince. It's not like you've never stolen anything either." Puck stuck his tongue out and popped one of the fruits into his mouth. "What about you, princess? Feeling adventurous?"

Meghan took one of the fruits cautiously. Nothing bad seemed to be happening to Puck, and she was already kinda intrigued. But then again, Puck was a full-blooded faery and she was only half. He seemed to fit here, despite being a Summer faery, while she'd been majorly freaked out by this castle. The cold seemed to seep into her body, even though she wore layers and layers of clothing to guard against it and Puck had enticed some of the fallen logs in the hearth to catch fire, the warmth barely made its way to her skin.

"What does it do?" She asked, raising a suspicious brow. "I thought you told me not to eat things given to me by faeries. You're still a faery, Puck."

Puck waved this away. "Aww hey, it's not like I'm going to give you something that'll hurt you, princess. Oberon would have my head. Well, technically, he'd kill me for letting you go this far into Tir Na Nog and _then_ he'd have my head, but details, details." He took a breath. "All that this will do is make you a little warmer than you are now."

He winked. "Honestly, that's it."

Meghan should have known enough about Puck, enough about him as Robbie Goodfell to know that when he winked something dangerous and probably regrettable was going to happen, but she was cold. And if it would shake off the prickles of frost threatening her from all angles, then she'd chance it.

Faeries couldn't lie, right?

Without giving herself a chance for a second thought, she tossed the fruit into her mouth and bit down.

At first, she didn't taste anything, just felt the warm ooze of the liquid inside the pod spilling out. She noticed that Ash was watching her with guarded eyes, as waiting for a reaction. Meghan was going to ask what his problem was, what he was waiting for, when the taste of the summerpod sank in.

It was like a thousand feasts erupting in her mouth at once, so fruity and intoxicating that she couldn't help but laugh at how amazing it felt. Her tongue was almost on fire with all the different sensations and she giggled as the flavors changed from sweet to tangy to salty and back to sweet as the pod's juices spread across her tongue.

When the laughter at last subsided, Meghan was oddly disappointed. She felt pleasantly warm as Puck had promised, but her mouth felt empty, like it was lacking something, like it knew that it was not going to experience a whirlwind of different flavors like that again for a long while. Almost reflexively, her eyes strayed to the bowl of summerpod fruit that Puck still held.

It didn't have to be that long. Besides, if they rescued Ethan and left, when would she get another chance?

"You see?" Puck grinned triumphantly at the Winter prince. "At least one of us knows how to have a good time. Besides, I think we have earned this, a good night's sleep, and more."

"More?" Ash repeated, notes of wariness in his voice. "What do you mean?"

Meghan bit her lip. More sounded like a good idea. A very good idea, actually.

"Well," Puck stretched. "Think about it. We just defeated an Iron faery. I almost got burnt to crispy little cinders and we've been on the run from the Summer Court to the equally dangerous, if not smellier, Winter Court. It's time for a little relaxation, ice boy, so try not to spoil our fun."

Ash arched a brow. "And how is it fun to rob a vacationing family?"

"It's just a few fruit. We can get them more. Have you forgotten how fun works?" Puck chided. "You just go with it, prince. Look, Meghan's got the right idea."

As if on cue, Meghan laughed.

"See? Someone appreciates my dry wit."

Meghan laughed again. And then laughed. And laughed.

"Somehow, I don't think that that's what you meant by having the right idea. Or any wit at all, really." Ash muttered as Puck's eyebrows knit into an expression of concern.

"Damn. Princess, are you okay?"

Meghan had had another summerpod, and then another, and one after that for good measure. She couldn't remember if there were more after that or not, but what she did know was that she felt as though her mouth had disconnected from the rest of her body, like the laughing sound were something different, someone else, even though she could still feel her mouth moving to make the sounds.

Everything was dissolving into warmth and noise. Puck was right! She tried to tell him how warm she felt, but she started crying because she was laughing so hard. She hadn't felt this good in ages...

"How many did you let her have?" Ash shot at Puck, his eyes dark and calculating.

"I don't know! A couple?" Puck had his hands on Meghan's shoulders, trying to steady her. "Can you hear me, princess? Hey! Come on, Meg."

Too warm, too warm. Meghan's brow knit, struggling weakly to break the contact. Hot. She had to get away, she was on fire. She needed to breathe-

The winter prince sighed, an I-told-you-so look written all over his face. "One would have been enough. She's only human, Goodfellow."

"She's Oberon's daughter. That makes her fey. Oh damn!" Puck had to think fast to catch Meghan before she hit the floor; as it was, his hands wrapped around her waist, trying to pull her up to a standing position, but her feet would not find purchase beneath her. Still, she kept laughing and laughing, as though her own incapacitation was all a big joke, even as she slipped into unconsciousness.

"You don't even remember how much these affect humans, do you?" Ash asked him coolly, despite the fact that Puck still held a girl being wracked by giggles. "You've been in the human world so long you've forgotten-"

"Shut up."

Puck held her close until at last her breathing settled into something more like its normal tempo. He knew what the ice prince had been about to say, oh sure. It was the same thing that Oberon had said to him, ironically enough.

_you've forgotten how to be fey_

Ash was silent, but his raised brow seemed to speak volumes about what he thought of the princess' appointed guardian. It wasn't the usual mix of derision that he saved for Puck, but something new, something made all the more insulting because it was spiked with, Puck almost couldn't believe it, pity.

"Don't. Just don't say it, okay?" Puck seethed, still cradling Meghan. "And help me get her somewhere she can sleep this off."

-o-

Fever and waking dream were nothing new to him. Hell, it was practically how Summer fey lived during big celebrations at Arcadia.

Still, Puck paced through the manor like a wisp of smoke, trying to find a window to climb his way out of. He wasn't sure where he was going, wasn't sure if he wanted to be anywhere. The summerpod still sang through his veins a little bit, making him want to fight and launch himself of rooftops at the same time, but it was tempered by something deeper, something sadder.

He glanced over his dagger hand, over the flesh that was still slightly shiny, one of the spots where Ironhorse's fire had burnt into him. His right foot hurt to walk on still, though he'd done a good job of hiding it around Ash (he didn't want his enemy knowing his weak points, after all), and his body just ached. Being caged and then having three fights all in quick succession was starting to wear him out. If he weren't more or less immortal already, he would have started to think that he was getting old.

Still, the fever licked at him, burnt along the insides of his bones. He'd never felt iron like that before, up that close, and it made him shiver. Something was definitely wrong in the Nevernever and if he'd had his choice, he thought as he looked out one of the upper windows and onto the frozen gardens below, he would never have walked Meghan into this.

But, as it stood, things were only going to get a lot worse.

-o-

"For what it's worth," he worried his bottom lip, his voice soft, "I'm sorry."

Meghan's forehead burnt, and Puck wondered if the summerpod was making her dream in overdrive, making her brain run so fast that it was making her whole body overheat. He gently pressed towels to her wrists, ushered the chill breeze coming from a crack in one of the walls to try and cool her down. Her face was by turns slack and contorted in pain; and while he tried to remain removed from the situation, impartial and able to take care of her, respond coolly, he was finding it more and more difficult to pull off.

Because the fact was, if he'd just been a little more careful about watching her, she wouldn't be like this. Meghan wouldn't be stuck in a bed, sweating and shivering in turns, and she wouldn't be wincing in her sleep like she were in pain.

He hadn't even noticed when Ash came in.

The winter prince sat in a chair on the other side of the bed, checking Meghan's forehead for her temperature as Puck had done. "You treat her too much like you."

Puck started, shocked for a moment but then his face settling into a familiar mocking expression. "Excuse me, your royal iciness, but I wasn't asking for your evaluation of me as her guardian."

"No. If you had, my statement would have been a lot less charitable." Ash responded nonchalantly. "My point is that you still don't realize how very different she is from you, from all of us."

"Not that different. She has Oberon's blood." Puck repeated defensively. "She's more faery than you think."

"Goodfellow." Ash met his eyes. "She is much more human than you think."

-o-

He fell asleep on her night table.

It wasn't like there weren't enough rooms in Chillsorrow Manor to accommodate all of them; the place was built so that even if Mab and the whole Winter Court chose to come down for a party on a whim they could do so without worrying about having enough rooms for all of their guests. The long corridors were lined with rooms, each of them furnished in icy finery.

He woke up and saw Meghan's chest rise and fall underneath the covers, lifting the blanket up and down in an even, rhythmic motion. Puck watched the blankets shift, waiting for some sign of consciousness but got none. He was supposed to have woken Ash to take over a few hours ago, he realized, but he wasn't quite ready to leave yet.

Questions burned at him as though each one were a fever, like he were caught in a mess of trees that tore at him as he tried to plod through.

Were they really so different after all?

After sixteen years of having her as his closest companion (and at times compatriot) alone in a land without magic, Puck hadn't realized how much he had assumed that he and Meghan were alike. Well, obviously not completely alike; he understood that she still had some limitations and didn't possess the same kind of power as he did, a faery that had been around for hundreds of years.

And so what if he thought of her more like him rather than a human? She _was_ fey, partly, and they weren't all that different. He'd had a hard time readjusting to the power of the Nevernever after his extended stay in the mortal realm, and he knew it hadn't been a cakewalk for Meghan either. They were alike, he knew that.

But, he sighed as he reached forward to stroke her cheek, still too hot, he couldn't deny that he had overestimated it a little bit. They were the same in some ways, both at odds with the courts, both magical beings too long in the mortal world, both acting too human for their own good. But the difference was still there, at times seeming insurmountable.

Why did he keep trying? The question cut into him like a blade of flame and he rested his head back into the crook of his arm on the table.

A part of him didn't know, wondered why he didn't just give up. He had stories written about him after all; it wasn't as though he could just give all that up and rush off to be with some half-fey girl. He closed his eyes. It would be too reckless. But then the other part of him spoke up, the part that reveled in fever, and reminded him that he was Puck and that it wasn't in him not to be reckless.

-o-

Sometime around dawn, Meghan Chase at last woke up, yawning and feeling sore all over, as if she'd just run a marathon. But what surprised her most wasn't her body's incredible weakness, but that on her bedside table was the still-sleeping form of her best friend, a very tired Puck.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note<strong>:

Hope you guys liked this! Sorry for the wait- school started again for me, so I have a lot of stuff to take care of again. I'll try to keep up with this, though. I also tried to keep the characters a little more IC, so let me know what you guys think! I love hearing from you.

-cy.


	12. The Rogue's Doubt

Maybe he was going insane. Or maybe the frigid cold of this place was finally getting to him.

He could have sworn that Meghan and Ash were having a Private Conversation (one that they had intended for no one to hear except for themselves) sometime before the group had started traveling for the day. As Oberon's best jester, naturally Puck made it his business to listen in on these things, but as Meghan's best friend...he'd opted not to.

Had that been a mistake?

Puck snuck a sidelong glance at Meghan and Ash as they chatted on the snowy path, mainly about Tir Na Nog's resident badies and beasties, how the Unseelie fey there lived, with Meghan trying to get a better handle on the local color. Puck wasn't all that interested (and he already knew most of it from his days spent with Ash and Ariella anyway) so he'd volunteered to take point and scout ahead for incoming trouble. But his thoughts kept returning to that sneaking suspicion that he was missing something. It didn't make sense. Hours ago, he was napping on Meghan's nightside table, worried that she'd seen through him too soon and now, he was concerned he hadn't shown enough.

He sighed, hands dug into his pockets. Was there any happy balance? And how much did he really want to know about what had happened between those two?

He didn't want to think about Meghan like that, like she were hiding things from him deliberately. He already felt kinda uncharitable thinking about Ash that way; they'd been friends centuries longer than they'd been enemies, and even though they made every attempt to battle each other to the dirty finish, Puck knew that neither of them had the heart to finish off the other. It was...difficult to explain. Logically, he knew that they could probably talk it out if they tried. But would he be willing to have a heart-to-heart with ice boy about a girl who'd meant so much to both of them before she'd died and maybe more to them after?

Nope.

Not in the least.

Puck made himself keep looking at the road, but it was pretty dull and his thoughts kept drifting back to Ash and Meghan. He was certain that something had passed between them, something that he hadn't seen, and no one was telling him about it. But was knowledge really better than ignorance? He chewed on his lip, considering.

They were making good time, at least, and even Grimalkin seemed to have taken the day off, ostensibly having more important things to do than trudge through snow, and Puck couldn't blame him. It had been only a few hours since they'd left the Chillsorrow Manor and already he had to cast a few warming spells on himself, and a couple subtler ones on Meghan so that she wouldn't freeze but not obvious enough for her to notice. Summer fey tended to do poorly in cold conditions and today was no exception. Even Puck's glamour seemed to be chipping away with each bite of wind.

Still, there was one faery in their party who seemed to be doing just fine.

"You can thank Goodfellow that we lost a day." Ash commented dryly. "If we'd started out yesterday, we might already be there by now."

Puck rolled his eyes, hands spaded in his pockets to keep out cold of the Winter kingdom, imaging the Winter prince move gracefully through the snow drifts behind him, walking his snooty walk. Like Meghan would find that attractive, Puck snorted as he slogged along, nowhere near as elegant as the prince.

"Geez, and here I thought that after the cat showed up, it would be impossible for our merry little party to get any more fun. You are just a barrel of sunshine, aren't you, Ash?" Puck retorted, eyes still roaming the landscape, looking for threats. It just looked very cold. Boring, but nothing he couldn't handle. Just like some ice prince...

Meghan pulled her cloak closer with a shiver. "Guys, much as I love hearing you two argue, I think there's a storm up ahead."

Before them was a cloud of white, ice and snow so concentrated that it did, as Meghan commented, look like a storm. It was only in one area, almost like a tornado of snow, but those weren't entirely uncommon here. All parts of the Nevernever were a little unpredictable at times, and Tir Na Nog had its own idiosyncrasies.

Puck probably wouldn't have looked twice at the cloud if it hadn't been for Ash.

It was a quick thing, but for a moment, the prince's calm demeanor broke and Puck caught a flash of surprise, recognition.

That was all it took for Puck to know that he had to get out the hell of there. Quickly summoning up a doppleganger of himself with a leaf, he took to the trees, watching as the wind whipped closer. He cursed himself for not getting Meghan out, too, tried to reason that he'd had no choice but to leave her if he wanted to help her later, but a part of him whispered that there was always a choice, and that he'd chosen wrong. When the cloud did meet their group, after all, it was Ash who was still with Meghan in corporeal form, not him.

And that seemed to make all the difference. Given the choice, would she choose someone real or someone fake?

Before he had time to ruminate on this, though, his doppelganger and Meghan were encased in ice.

"And here I thought I overreacted." Puck breathed. "Well, damn."

Under normal circumstances, he would have leapt into action and worked to get her out but right now something didn't feel right. His eyes were narrowed into slits- he had to find out who'd done this. It didn't look like Meghan was in one of Mab's famous living-but-constantly-suffocating icicles, but Puck wasn't willing to risk freeing her before he knew who he was taking on. He'd worked with Ash enough in the past to know that that prince would probably try to squirm out of this if it was a winter sidhe, but in case Ash failed and they had to fight, Puck would need to be ready in the wings.

"Just like old times." The jester sighed. It was just the waiting that was torturous.

"Narissa." Ash's voice was pitiless, bored. He didn't make a move to helping either of his trapped compatriots, but instead turned to face the cloud as it condensed into the form of a beautiful snow nymph.

"Prince," the sidhe, Narissa, inclined her head in a bow, "how very fortunate that we met here. Your mother the Queen has been very worried about you." She said the last word like a dagger thrust, sharp, verging on mocking. "And how nice, you have the half-breed with you. Why don't I just take her back with me to the castle for you? After all, it would only be demeaning for you to be seen with her now."

Ash tensed and Puck rolled his eyes. Some emotions the ice prince just could not hide to save his life. Like anger. And...being a cold jerk. "I don't think so."

"Come now," Narissa beckoned, pursing her lips into a pout, "you must allow me to take her from here, Ash darling. You know that this is no job fit for a prince."

Puck watched and drew his dagger as Ash shifted into a fighting stance. Time for the cavalry to get ready.

Ash's sword gleamed in his hand as he pointed it out at the sidhe with a cruel but knowing smile. "Then that explains why Rowan sent you instead of coming himself, doesn't it?"

-o-

It turned out to be a straight-forward affair. Puck supposed that he could have dropped down from the branches and popped in to finish the snow sidhe off, but decided that he'd let the Winter court deal with its own idiots. What he really wanted to do was to get Meghan out of her ice prison.

But Ash was the one who had the most practice with that sort of thing. Drawing on Summer magic in Tir Na Nog was tricky business already, and while Robin Goodfellow wasn't the kind of faery to admit that he was easy pickings for anyone, he'd be dumb to say he was still at his best. If Puck tried to get Meghan out, he might end up drowning her, or at the very least getting her clothes completely soaked, since he'd probably have to melt the icicle in its entirety. Assuming that he could muster up the magic to do it, which might not be possible.

No, some things in life were best left to a professional, and though it pained him to do it, sometimes he had to sacrifice a little now (like his pride and, okay, maybe a desire to show Meghan all the cool Summer fey things they could do together) in order to gain a lot later. Oddly enough, waiting was much less easier the second time he had to do it.

When at last the snow nymph was nothing but bits of ice and a bad memory, Ash turned to Meghan and gently shattered the crystal. Puck let out a soft, low whistle of appreciation as the shards of ice flew outwards and avoided hitting Meghan or scratching her at all. The kid knew his stuff. Puck was about to make his entrance- he was thinking about knocking on the icicle in which his likeness was trapped and making a joke about how winter wear wasn't his thing- when something made him stop.

"Ash, you have to get Puck out, too!" Meghan was on her knees, her breath coming heavily. She'd probably gotten too cold, Puck realized and bit back a wave of anger. He couldn't have acted, but Ash could have been a little quicker about rescuing her. These were his dumbass subjects after all- he should know how to corral them.

The Unseelie prince turned to Meghan, his eyes dead. "Why would I do that?"

"Because," Meghan was confused; to her, this made no sense, she still saw them all as humans, not as the fey they were, "he's your friend, right?"

Ash laughed, a hollow sound, like wind whistling through bones, and turned back to the path.

Puck rolled his eyes, coming back down through the trees. Oh jeez. Talk about ways to upset a princess. It was one of the Nevernever's greatest mysteries that Ariella had stuck around with Lord of the Ice Cubes for so long when he acted like this. Still, Meghan had a lot to learn about him and Ash. In fact, Puck realized that he probably still had a lot of learn about him and Ash as well.

Puck was about to reveal himself, pat Meghan on the back and thank her for her concern, but that really, he was a big faery and could look after himself, when she said something that would make him freeze on his branch, make him reconsider everything that he had given up, everything that he had done up to this point.

"Ash, we had a deal! Now get back here and get Puck out right now!"

A _deal_?

Ash walked back, a mirthless smirk on his face. "Our deal involved you and me, not Goodfellow. Or don't you remember?"

Meghan was furious. Somewhere in Puck's numbed mind, he realized that he'd never seen her this mad, even when her mother forgot that she needed a ride into school or that it was her birthday. "If you don't unfreeze him right now, then I'm not coming with you back to your Court. Got it?"

Ice shattered, flew away in all directions inward and outward, but Puck didn't notice. He dropped down from the tree lightly, his feet barely noting how cold the snow was, deadly quiet. Meghan ran forward and grabbed his double's bloodied body as it fell, but her words still echoed in his head. His surprise registered dully at the fact that the doppelganger had lasted after taking so much injury, but then the battered Puck vanished as Meghan still cradled it in her arms, only to look up in shock to find that her hands held only the frayed skeleton of a leaf. It didn't last long.

Maybe the real Puck wouldn't either.

"You made a deal with him, princess?" He asked, standing behind her. Meghan swing around, her face pale, eyes glistening, the silly leaf still cupped in her hands like a dead bird or something precious. He could tell that she wanted to say something, but he wasn't ready for that, wouldn't let her. "You sold your freedom to him so that he would come with us? Is that it?"

Meghan swallowed, and in that instant he knew that he'd been right.

Puck felt the impact of his fist pounding into the frost-encrusted bark of the tree before he even had the thought to punch it.

"Puck, listen, I had to do it. I need to find Ethan and to do that I needed someone to show me the way into the Unseelie Court, someone who could fight-"

He could stand to hear no more.

"I could have done that!" Puck felt the rage coiling up within him, burning his chest, throat, mouth on the way out, like the words he spoke were made of molten fire instead of air. "Damn it, princess! I could have protected you. I could have gotten you into the castle. How many times do you think I've snuck in there? I found you the trod. I've protected you for sixteen years! What made you think that I wouldn't have been enough?"

He wasn't sure he she responded or not, wasn't sure if he wanted to hear.

She hadn't thought that he could do it. She'd thought he wasn't good enough.

She'd seen him get imprisoned by Oberon, seen him at his worst, and decided that he wasn't worth the risk, that she would rather place her safety in the hands of someone better equipped to look after her, someone just as royal as she was, someone he could never be.

Someone, Puck seethed, who was standing just a few feet out of striking distance.

"You had me." He said in a softer voice, feeling at last beginning to creep up his bloodied hand as the adrenaline faded and the pain made itself known. "Why on earth wasn't I enough?"

Puck knew he probably should have expected it. Betrayal was just something that faeries did, royalty especially. Kings and queens double-crossed each other everyday and Puck took great delight in making fun of them. Everyone said that Robin Goodfellow was long overdue a bad prank of his own, and he whole-heartedly agreed with them. He even had a few faeries he'd expected it would come from.

He just hadn't expected that the person to finally do it would be Meghan Chase.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note<strong>:

I am so sorry that this took forever to get up! School started again and it's made getting chapters going a little more difficult; I've also be working on an original project of mine as well, so balancing out the time between fanfic and my other work has been difficult. Never fear, though, because now that we are entering the craziness of this story, I will try to get more chapters coming at you guys. ;D

Hope stuff has been good for everyone and I'll do my best to have another chapter up as soon as I can!

Hearts,

-cy.


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